The Canongate Burns. Robert Burns

80 ‘The Burns Cult’, in Hugh MacDiarmid: Selected Prose, ed. Riach (Manchester: Carcanet, 1992), p. 82.

81 Ibid., p. 84. MacDiarmid’s most sustained polemic against the Burns Federation and Cult can be found in Burns Today and Tomorrow (Edinburgh: Castle Wynd Printers Ltd, 1959).

82 The Complete Poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, Vol. 1, pp. 693–4. This can be compared to the much more in your face ‘Your Immortal Memory, Burns!’, pp. 77–9.

83 ‘Burns and Baudelaire’, pp. 70–1.

84 ‘Robert Burns’ in A Channel Passage, and Other Poems (London, 1904).

85 ‘The Neglect of Byron’ in The Raucle Tongue, Vol. 1, p. 77.

86 Some qualification for this is to be found in Burns Today and Tomorrow where MacDiarmid does address the politics of the 1790s and compares the French and Russian Revolutions, pp. 105–10.

87 Iain Crichton Smith, ‘The Golden Lyric’ in Towards the Human (Edinburgh: Macdonald, 1986), pp. 176–91.

88 ‘The Neglect of Byron’, p. 76.

89 W. H. Auden, ‘Light Verse’ in The English Auden: Poems, Essays and Dramatic Writings 1927–1939 (London: Faber & Faber, 1977), p. 367.

90 ‘Contrary Scriptings: Implied National Narratives in Burns and Smollett’ in Love and Liberty, p. 213.

       Editorial Policy and Practice

      As we have seen in our Introduction, nineteenth-century editors were seriously remiss, with varied degrees of ignorance and prejudice, in providing a proper context for the poems and the politically fractious culture out of which they emerged. One could simply not expect any knowledgeable enthusiasm for a revolutionary, democratic Burns given the victory of the British Old Regime during the ideological war of the 1790s, so complete was it that it virtually wiped the radical struggle from national memory. Towards the end of the century, the Henley–Henderson edition of 1896 brought Burns editorship to a nadir by combining Henley’s rampant right-wing jingoism with a deliberate policy of ‘correcting’ the poet’s spelling, punctuation and stresses according to modern standards. Burns’s distinctive habit of spelling place and proper names in capitals, italicising idioms and ironies and his use of long dashes are virtually all purged from their edition. This constant, careless editorial meddling seriously disrupts the intelligible rhythm of the poems by an accelerated ‘streamlining’ of the reading process so that the poet’s voice is significantly diminished.

In the twentieth century we had the heroic scholarship of the American, Professor J. De Lancey Ferguson, with his edition of the letters. This, as his correspondence with Catherine Carswell shows,1 was achieved with, at best, the non-cooperation of the then Scottish Burns establishment. Despite his great scholarly virtues, De Lancey Ferguson was not sufficiently equipped in either the political history of ideas or comparative Romantic scholarship to provide the letters and their recipients with the literary and political context needed to bring Burns into fuller focus, although he did begin down this road with his last essay, the largely unknown but brilliant critique on previous editorship, They Censored Burns.2 Sadly, Oxford’s expensive re-edition of the letters in 1985 arguably achieved its most significant addition by appending Professor G. Ross Roy’s name as editor.

      The three-volume Oxford edition of Burns: Songs and Poems (1968) by James Kinsley, is by far the most important edition of the poems. He lists a formal number of 605 poems and songs within the canon. However, several works are counted by him under a number with sub-categories, 100A, 100B, and so on. This means he accepts 621 poems, songs and fragments to the canon. This is increased further by the poems within Kinsley’s Dubia section – those works he could not properly date in terms of composition. Hence, the overall Kinsley total is around 630, with a few marked as ‘probably’ authentic.

There is, however, among his extensive, indeed, apparently exhaustive quarrying of Burns’s poetry for the poet’s quite enormous range of allusion to English, Scottish, Folk and, not least, Biblical sources, a degree of exhibitonist erudition. One really doubts that even so much a poet’s poet as Burns (the very reverse of the limited ploughman) had access to such esoteric texts. Given that qualification, this new edition is everywhere marked by Kinsley’s scholarly presence. As with Carol McGuirk’s excellent Robert Burns: Selected Poems (Penguin, 1993), we have everywhere tried to acknowledge our specific debts. While Kinsley is almost Olympian in erudition, the same cannot be said of his degree of detachment. Though less obviously so, his edition carries many of the omissions and prejudices of nineteenth-century scholars. Kinsley, essentially, was a conservative eighteenth-century scholar with neither patience for nor understanding of Romantic radical poetics. It may be that such wilful obscuritanism in Kinsley is part of a much larger pattern prevailing in British literary criticism. David Norbrook, in a recent study of seventeenth-century English poetry3 argues that there is an in-built, repressive prejudice in our national literary criticism to prefer a royalist over a republican poetics. He comments that the memory of republican poetry had been ‘kept at bay by a cordon sanitaire of defensive ridicule’. The parallel between the bloody crucible of the mid-seventeenth century and the political tumult of the 1790s should be obvious from our introduction with relevance to Burns and Scotland and what was subsequently done to him.

      In his Warton lecture to the British Academy on 23 January 1974, Kinsley summarised what he had learned from his work on Burns. Thus he wrote:

Indeed, the deep spring of his finest poetry was not literary at all – not even the vernacular tradition – but what he called his ‘social disposition’; a heart ‘completely tinder and … eternally lighted up by some Goddess or other’ and a ‘strong appetite for sociability’ … This appetite led him often into ‘scenes of swaggering riot and roaring dissipation’ … It also gave him the chance and capacity to see the rustic society about him with the sympathy and critical clarity of a Breughel; to write some of the most natural and generous verse letters in the language; and give to the world some of its best songs.4

      The implications of his bizarre conclusions are not those to induce confidence in his editorial vision or practices, coming from an editor whose perhaps over-laden commentary annotates the extraordinary degree of Burns’s allusiveness to other poetry. From the evidence of his poetry and letters he is about as unliterary as James Joyce. Indeed, from further remarks, it would seem Kinsley’s intention was to keep Burns’s poetry marginalised on the rural farm, isolated from his English contemporaries and de-politicised.

      Dr James Mackay’s 1993 edition, endorsed by the Burns Federation, parasitically plunders Kinsley’s volume III annotations (often presenting them as his own, without acknowledgement) and, to make matters worse, reproduces the worst Burns text available, that of the corrupted Henley–Henderson edition.