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13 - Scottish poetry and regional literary expression

from PART II - LITERARY GENRES: ADAPTATION AND REFORMATION

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 March 2008

By
Fiona Stafford
Edited by
John Richetti
John Richetti
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
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Summary

At a Shrove Tuesday party in 1785, Robert Burns first heard ‘When I upon thy Bosom Lean’, a song by the local, Ayrshire poet, John Lapraik. He wrote at once to congratulate the author, but his verse letter, subsequently published as ‘Epistle to J. L*****K, An Old Scotch Bard’ is far more than a friendly tribute to a fellow poet. As Burns recreates his response to Lapraik's song, he takes the opportunity to express a sense of pride in the larger, shared culture of his native Scotland, while at the same time registering his sharp sense of the dilemmas facing contemporary poets whose familiar language and forms were different from those regarded as standard and acceptable by the period's influential men of letters. The contradictions inherent in prevailing aesthetic attitudes meet in Burns' poem, which is at once a celebration of local tradition and a manifestation of the complicated relationship between Scottish and English culture.

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Information
The Cambridge History of English Literature, 1660–1780 , pp. 340 - 362
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2005

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