"A Modern Poet on the Scotch Bard": Walt Whitman's 1875 Essay on Robert Burns

In his 1996 essay "W hitman on Robert Burns: An Early Essay Recovered," Gary Scharnhorst draws attention to an early critical essay on Burns that had "hitherto been lost to scholarship."1 The essay to which he refers, titled "A Modern Poet on The Scotch Bard," first appeared in an ephemeral newspaper titled Our Land and Time in January 1875 and was subsequently reprinted in the London Academy in February that same year. Whitman later revised the essay for publication- changing the title to "Robert Burns as Poet and Person"-in the New York Critic (1882), and made minor textual edits for the North American Review in 1886. The North American Review version also appeared three times in 1888 -in November Boughs, Democratic Vistas and Other Papers (London: Walter Scott), and Complete Poems and Prose.Critics of Burns have frequently referenced "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" when commenting on the possible influence of Burns on Whitman and, more broadly, American literature. Though Scharnhorst drew attention to the discovery of the 1875 early version almost two decades ago, remarkably little has since been written about the essay by scholars of Burns or Whitman. Revisiting Whitman's "lost" essay is a useful exercise in helping to accentuate and enhance our understanding of his views on Burns. The complete lack of critical engagement with "A Modern Poet on The Scotch Bard" means that, hitherto, we do not have the fullest possible sense of the American poet's appraisal. I will begin by considering some of the existing commentary regarding "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" before going on to examine the "lost" passages of the 1875 essay.Quite often, the more laudatory aspects of "Robert Burns as Poet and Person" have been strongly emphasized in Burns scholarship, leading to the popular assumption that the American poet "admired and praised Burns" and identified with the "inextricable linkage of American liberty and the common man in Burns's art and thought."2 Perhaps the most commonly quoted, and thus influential, passage from the 1882 and 1886 essays has been W hitman's powerful proclamation that:. . . there are many things in Burns's poems and character that specially endear him to America. He was essentially a Republican-would have been at home in the Western United States, and probably become eminent there. He was an average sample of the good-natured, warm-blooded, proud-spirited, amative, alimentive, convivial, young and early-middle-aged man of the decent-born middle classes everywhere and any how. Without the race of which he is a distinct specimen, (and perhaps his poems) America and her powerful Democracy could not exist to-day-could not project with unparallel'd historic sway in the future.3The esteem of Whitman, as well as praise by Ralph Waldo Emerson,4 certainly contributed to Burns becoming "an idol of both cultural and literary proportions for the nineteenth-century American reading public."5 However, as Carol McGuirk and Robert Crawford have noted, a fuller reading of W hitman's 1886 essay reveals that the American poet was not entirely complimentary about Burns, despite heralding him as the "tenderest, manliest, and (even if contradictory) dearest flesh-and-blood figure in all the streams and clusters of by-gone poets" (NB 64; PW 2:568). In an excellent essay, McGuirk suggests that W hitman seems both "amazed and rather put off " by Burns's "emphatic rhyming sound," asserting that the strong influence of Wordsworth may have rendered Burns's verse "too informal for direct and full imitation by nineteenth-century American poets or too direct."6 Indeed, in Whitman's revised 1886 essay, he describes Burns's versification as "idiomatic ear-cuffing" restricted by a "low and contracted" understanding of poetry (NB 63; PW 2:567-568). While praising the "raciness" and "humour" of Burns's "genuine poetic imagination," Whitman derides the morality in Burns's poetry, rendering it "hardly more than parrot talk" (NB 60-61; PW 2:563). …