Robert Burns Neoclassical

Info

- Scottish heaven-taught plowman

- untaught poetic genius needed to vindicate romantic faith

- superb lyricist-perhaps the greatest in English-in all his rustic trappings

- Scottish dialect - Ayrshire

- Spenserian stanza - partly in dialectical Scots and partly in literary English, unites separate traditions-English and Scottish, literary and popular, etc-from which he drew

- 18th-century Scottish literary nationalism

- great master of 18th-century satire in English and of such conventional forms such as the ode and the verse epistle

- stands in front rank of poets who have expressed with simplicity the common feelings of mankind

- poems inlaid with epigrammatic moralism

Works

- "A Red, Red Rose" - hyperbole

- Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect - one of most remarkable first volumes of verse ever published

- "The Holy Fair"; "Holy Willie's Prayer" - satirized community orthodoxy

- "To a Mouse"; "To a Louse" - sympathy for downtrodden and scorn for mighty

- "A Cotter's Saturday Night"

- The Scots Musical Museum and a Select Collection of Scottish Airs

Terms

- Spenserian stanza - 9-line stanza rhyming ababbcbcc with eight iambic pentameter lines followed by a line of iambic hexameter

- ode - long, highly stylized lyric poem written in complex stanza on serious theme and often for specific occasion

- verse epistle - poem, usually of high seriousness, takes form of address to friend

Citation

Horton, Ronald A. British Literature for Christian Schools. Greeville, SC: Bob Jones University, 1992.