Robert-Burns-and-Highland-Mary-Thomas-Faed-RA-HRSA-Oil-Painting

February 19, 2019 by Alexander Meldrum

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Robert Burns some lesser-known facts about the man and his work. 6. Burns the radical, the socialist, the nationalist, the…? The poet and critic Edwin Muir (1887–1959) once remarked that Burns is “to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious”. Such mixed messages as people find in Burns’s writing have encouraged different groups to attempt to appropriate him for different cultural and political purposes, including recruitment into the British Army during the First World War through to the referendum for Scottish Independence in 2014, in which both sides claimed that Burns would have voted for their side if he were still alive. We may ask which way Burns would have voted were he around today, but we often forget that political life was very different in the poet’s own day, those party politics was not as ideologically polarised as today, and that Burns would not even have been entitled to vote in what was still a pre-democratic country. Alas, we may never know how Burns would have felt about Brexit. Burns’s own political views are difficult to unpick, although he has been frequently appropriated for progressive politics, even to the extent of being hailed a proto-socialist or celebrated in such places as the former Soviet Union. We divine progressive values in his celebration of ordinary life and his satire of social hierarchy, as exemplified in the radical anthem ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’. An early version of this song appeared in the short-lived radical Glasgow Magazine of 1795 when the mood for political reform was high, and the repressive measures enacted against ‘sedition’ excessive. Though a friend to reform, Burns published his sentiments anonymously: as an exciseman and therefore a government employee, he had to maintain an outward show of loyalty to King George. ‘A Man’s a Man’ was later sung at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, showing how a song that challenged the political establishment of his own day could be appropriated to speak for the political establishment of another time. Go to Wikipedia for full History

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