SOURCE: "Dialect and Diction in Burns," in A Burns Companion, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1991, pp. 79-88.

In a book generally dismissive of Scots as a literary language, Edwin Muir suggested that when he 'wished to express his real judgement [Burns] turned to English' (Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland, 1936). Muir's supposition that, for Burns, Scots was 'a language for sentiment but not for thought' simply ignores the evidence of Burns's poetry in pursuit of the argument that, since the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Scottish people had felt in Scots and thought in English. Muir's patronising remarks about Burns's Scots verse are as crass as those the poet had to put up with in his lifetime, as an anecdote illustrates.

On 1 February 1787 the 11th Earl of Buchan, David Erskine, wrote to Burns about the Kilmarnock Edition, praising 'These little doric pieces of yours in our provincial dialect'. As usual, Burns was not above 'kissing the arse of a peer' (as he accused the Douglas brothers of doing in his 'Ballad Second: The Election'), and replied in the humble role he had assumed: 'I must return to my rustic station, and, in my wonted way, woo my rustic Muse at the Ploughtail'. In August 1791 Lord Buchan again wrote to Burns, inviting him to travel to Ednam (seventy-five miles from Ellisland), the birthplace of James Thomson, to attend 'the coronation of the bust of Thomson, on Ednam Hill, on the 22d of September; for which day perhaps [Mr Burns's] muse may inspire an ode suited to the occasion'.

In his reply (29 August 1791), Burns declined the invitation, on account of the harvest, but thanked 'your Lordship for the honour, the very great honour, you have done me, in inviting me to the coronation of the bust of Thomson'. As for an ode, Burns declared himself unequal to the task of emulating Collins's 'Ode Occasioned by the Death of Mr Thomson' but he enclosed an 'Address to the Shade of Thomson, on Crowning his Bust at Ednam, Roxburghshire, with Bays'. Collins's ode begins:

Burns's address ends:

There is not much to choose qualitatively between the two quatrains, Burns simply going through the metrical motions in honour of a poet he genuinely admired.

Burns need not have bothered with his occasional ode for the ceremonial occasion was a farce. As the bust of Thomson had been broken—'in a midnight frolic during [September] race week'—Lord Buchan laid a laurel wreath on a copy of Thomson's The Seasons. Burns commented on this in his quatrains 'On Some Commemorations of Thomson'. This time he broke into Scots, after the first line, and gave his honest opinion of the likes of Lord Buchan:

That, reminiscent of his attack on the Edinburgh gentry who wasted money on cards while Fergusson starved ('Epistle to William Simson'), represents Burns's honest opinion of poets and aristocratic patrons. And when he was most honest as a poet, he was most Scottish.

Writing to George Thomson on 19 October 1794, Burns confessed:

These English Songs gravel me to death.—I have not that command of the language that I have of my native tongue.—In fact, I think that my ideas are more barren in English than in Scottish.

By that time Burns had seen three editions of his poems published and must have reflected, on reading them, that his English efforts were pastiches of favourites like Pope, Thomson, Shenstone and Gray whereas his poems 'chiefly in the Scottish dialect' were masterful. He had no longer any need for the diffidence he showed in January 1787 when writing to Dr John Moore:

For my part, my first ambition was, and still my strongest wish is, to please my Compeers, the rustic Inmates of the Hamlet … I know very well, the novelty of my character has by far the greatest share in the learned and polite notice I have lately got; and in a language where Pope and Churchill have raised the laugh, and Shenstone and Gray drawn the tear; where Thomson and Beattie have painted the landskip, and Littleton and Collins described the heart; I am not vain enough to hope for distinguished Poetic fame.

Using the language of Pope, Shenstone and Gray, he was destined to come off second best.

Quoting some lines from Burns's 'On the Death of Lord President Dundas', Matthew Arnold ('The Study of Poetry', Essays in Criticism, Second Series, 1888) remarked 'By his English poetry Burns in general belongs to the eighteenth century, and has little importance for us. Evidently ['On the Death of Lord President Dundas'] is not the real Burns, or his name and fame would have disappeared long ago.' This judgement of one poet by another is just. Burns became internationally celebrated through his Scots poems, not his English pastiches. Remarkably, Burns achieved such recognition by casting his finest work in a national language in a state of atrophy though his linguistic efforts were not always appreciated by his contemporaries. Several of his admirers, including Dr John Moore, urged the poet to write in English rather than Scots. On 23 May 1787 Moore gave the poet some gratuitous advice: 'you already possess a great variety of expression and command of the English language; you ought, therefore, to deal more sparingly, for the future, in the provincial dialect'.

Similarly, various early reviewers regretted the language of his verse. James Anderson, discussing the Kilmarnock Edition in the Monthly Review of December 1786, felt that Burns was badly limited by his language:

We much regret that these poems are written in some measure in an unknown tongue, which must deprive most of our Readers of the pleasure they would otherwise naturally create; being composed in the Scottish dialect, which contains many words that are altogether unknown to an English reader …

John Logan, writing in the English Review, February 1787, regretted that 'his provincial dialect confines his beauties to one half of the island'. An unsigned notice in the General Magazine and Impartial Review (1787), worried over the linguistic resources of Burns:

It is greatly to be lamented that these poems are 'chiefly in the Scottish dialect', as it must necessarily confine their beauties to a small circle of readers, and as the author has given good specimens of his skill in the English …

All the collections of Burns's verse published in the poet's lifetime—the Kilmarnock Edition of 1786 and the Edinburgh editions of 1787 and 1793—are entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. In the Preface to the Kilmarnock Edition, Burns introduces himself as a poetic primitive who 'sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language'. Two stanzas from separate verse-epistles in the Kilmarnock Edition reinforce this proclamation of faith in the natural, though not naive, use of a native language:

The implication is obvious: Burns's muse is to make an emotional appeal through the use of the familiar language of Lallans (Lowland Scots); what he also (in 'The Brigs of Ayr') called 'braid Scots' (broad Scots). Linguistically, the situation was not so simple as Burns suggests.

Scots, like English a dialect of Anglo-Saxon, had developed as an indigenous and eloquently expressive language in Scotland and, by the first half of the sixteenth century, had acquired 'it's full status as a national speech adequate for all the demands laid on it, for poetry, for literary and official prose, public records and the ordinary business transactions of life' (David Murison, The Guid Scots Tongue, 1977). However, Scots began to be undermined by the triumph of the Protestant Reformation in 1560. In the absence of a Scots translation of the Bible, the Reformers adopted a translation completed in 1560 by English refugees in Geneva. This had profound linguistic implications. The word of God, the sacred logos, was given in English. Scots began to be perceived as an inferior language, suitable for everyday conversation and comic verse but lacking the scriptural authority of English.

In 1603 the Scottish and English crowns were both conferred on James VI and I and with the Union of Crowns the Scottish court followed the king to London. The king himself began to write poetry in English and other Scottish poets followed the royal example. Consecrated by the Geneva Bible and commended by the court, the king's English was twice-blessed. With the parliamentary Act of Union, 1 May 1707, English became the official language of Scotland (North Britain) as well as England.

Born into a nation reduced to provincial status, Burns looked back in anger and indignation at the 'parcel of rogues' (the thirty-one Scottish commissioners) who sold Scotland 'for English gold'. The first stanza of his patriotic lament 'Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation' (1792) conveys his feelings, ironically enough, in a Scots-accented English.

'England's province' set about accomodating the English in style. Scottish expressions—'Scotticisms'—became, for the intellectuals, synonymous with vulgarisms. David Hume used Scottish words in convivial conversation but scrupulously avoided them in his philosophical writing. In 1761 Edinburgh's Select Society, of which Hume was a founder-member, employed an actor (ironically, an Irishman, Thomas Sheridan, father of Richard Brinsley Sheridan) to coach its members in the southern pronunciation of English. In 1779 James Beattie, a man Burns admired both as poet and (Common Sense) philosopher, published his Scotticisms, Arranged in Alphabetical Order, Designed to Correct Improprieties of Speech and Writing. According to Dugald Stewart, Burns avoided Scots expressions in conversation:

Nothing, perhaps, was more remarkable among his various attainments, than the fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided more successfully than most Scotchmen the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology.

Burns, however, would have been anxious to impress a university philosopher like Stewart with his command of the English language. In other circumstances he may well have used a Scots as rich as that in his letter of 1 June 1787 to William Nicol….

It was not only Burns's rural upbringing in Ayr that gave him a more creative attitude to Scots than his urban contemporaries. If he spoke Scots at home, he also knew that Scots had an artistic dimension beyond everyday conversation for, as a child, he heard songs and ballads of the oral tradition from his mother and his mother's friend Betty Davidson. Though he was educated as 'an excellent English scholar' these songs and ballads (some of which he adapted, like 'John Barleycorn', some of which he preserved, like 'Tam Lin') became an inescapable part of his poetic inheritance. Still, it took a decidedly literary movement to give him poetic motion and the confidence to generate his own artistic energy.

If Scots was deplored as a conversational medium in polite urban society, Scottish poets were not willing to abandon the rich literary resources of Scots. Initiating a revival in the 1720s Allan Ramsay used Scots in his most successful poems and, following this precedent, Robert Fergusson found his own voice in Scots, writing vigorously vernacular poems about the urban vitality of his native Edinburgh. Burns studied Ramsay's work and, in 1782, bought a copy of the Second Edition of Fergusson's Poems. It was, as Burns repeatedly acknowledged, the Scots revivalist verse of Ramsay and Fergusson that prompted him to apply himself to the art of poetry. In the Preface to the Kilmarnock Edition, he confessed himself unequal to 'the genius of a Ramsay, or the glorious dawnings of the poor, unfortunate Fergusson'; in the 'Epistle to J. Lapraik' he hoped for 'a spunk ï Allan's glee / Or Fergusson's, the bauld an slee'. In his Inscription for Fergusson's headstone (erected at his expense) he directed Scotland to 'the Poet's Dust'; in his 'Apostrophe to Fergusson' (1787) he lamented 'my elder brother in misfortune, / By far my elder brother in the Muse'; in 'Lines on Fergusson, the Poet' he acclaimed the 'Heaven-taught Fergusson'; and in his Autobiographical Letter to Dr John Moore he said he had abandoned rhyme 'but meeting with Fergusson's Scotch poems [in 1782], I strung anew my wildly-sounding, rustic lyre with emulating vigour'.

As the Kilmarnock and First Edinburgh Editions demonstrated, Burns used Scots not only for emotional outbursts and descriptive 'manners-painting' ('The Vision') but for ecclesiastical satire ('The Holy Fair', for example), social comment ('The Twa Dogs'), political evaluation ('A Dream'), philosophical reflection ('To a Mouse'), graveyard humour ('Death and Doctor Hornbook') and matters of morality ('Address to the Unco Guid'). For all his role-playing as a poetic ploughman, Burns took his Scots work extremely seriously, denying that the use of dialect alone automatically produced poetry. Writing to Mrs Dunlop in 1789 he complained 'my success has encouraged such a shoal of ill-spawned monsters to crawl into public notice under the title of Scots Poets, that the very term, Scots Poetry, borders on the burlesque'. The Scots-writing Scottish poet had to use the language poetically and not rest passively on the linguistic laurels of the past.

Burns was enough of a product of his period to assume English affectations: his professed admiration for Shenstone, his elegant epistolary style, his ability to hold his own as a conversationalist in polite company (Scott, who heard Burns speak, thought his conversation 'expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption'). As a poet, however, he transcended his period by renewing the Scots tradition in a startling way, applying his art to a bewildering variety of subjects. Writing in Scots he managed, by great artistry, to stimulate a conversational tone that sounded anything but artificial. Not so in English. All poetic language is, by definition, artificial but, for Burns, English was excruciatingly artificial—indeed alien—as a poetic medium.

Burns's poems in English are, by general consent, his weakest artistic efforts. The Kilmarnock Edition has poems that alternate Augustan English with Scots, most effectively in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' where the first English stanza is in deliberate contrast to the Scots stanzas that follow. In 'Epistle to Davie', however, the use of English in the ninth and tenth stanzas vitiates the overall impact of the verse, as Burns awkwardly imitates the insipid English diction of favourite poets like Shenstone. Ending 'A Solemn Meditation' Shenstone writes:

Beginning 'The Lament' Burns similarly expresses worldweariness in an inflated English full of affectation:

A poet had to achieve other effects than pining and wandering and wailing and weeping in English.

Shortly after he arrived in Edinburgh, Burns composed an 'Address to Edinburgh' which duly appeared in the First Edinburgh Edition. Here Burns might have risen racily to the occasion. After all, he was wordly enough to observe what went on in the capital with 'bucks strutting, ladies flaring, blackguards sculking, whores leering' and he knew 'Auld Reikie' by his favourite Scots poet, Fergusson:

Auld Reikie, wale o ilka town
That Scotland kens beneath the moon;
Where couthy chiels at e'ening meet
Their bizzing craigs and mous to weet;
And blythly gar auld care gae bye
Wi blinkit and wi bleering eye…

Alas, Burns was unable to emulate Fergusson on this occasion, beginning his poem by apostrophising 'Edina! Scotia's darling seat!'

Whereas his Scots poems had vividly explored the landscape of Ayrshire in unforgettably energetic language, this English poem praises the capital through a catalogue of unconvincing personifications:

The poem is constructed around clichés—'noble pride', 'native skies', 'eagle eyes'—and comprises a sustained cliché which makes it typical of Burns's English poems.

Burns's poems in Scots were inspirational, his poems in English were occasional. The English Pindaric ode that appears, framed by Scots, in 'A Winter Night' was occasional in that the occasion was a set-piece, an exercise in a particular form and little more than that: 'my first attempt in that irregular kind of measure in which many of our finest Odes are wrote'. To please the likes of Robert Riddell Burns wrote occasional poems for particular places. 'Verses in Friars' Carse Hermitage'—with clichés such as 'russet weed', 'silken stole', 'idle dream'—may have gratified one man but never reached out to an international audience the way the great Scots poems did, and do.

The most celebrated English passage in Burns is that in 'Tam o Shanter' beginning 'But pleasures are like poppies spread' which has some of the delicacy of the Milton of 'L'Allegro' ('There on beds of violet blue, / And fresh-blown roses washt in dew') and is an advance on 'Address to Edinburgh'. It does not, however, support Muir's argument, in Scott and Scotland, about the intellectual superiority of English to Scots …and it functions poetically because its languid diction interrupts the narrative and allows Burns to put an urgent stress on the Scots dialect that immediately follows it: 'Nae man can tether time or tide, / The hour approaches Tam maun ride'. Had the succeeding lines been in Burns's best Augustan English, it is a safe bet to say the poem would have plodded along, not galloped along the way it does.

English poetic diction was alien to Burns's artistic talent and temperament. He could imitate English poets as witness his 'From Esopus to Maria' which is a parody of Pope's 'Eliosa to Abelard': 'In these deep solitudes and awful cells, / Where heavenly pensive contemplation dwells' (Pope); 'From these drear solitudes and frowsy cells / Where Infamy with sad Repentance dwells' (Burns). He could echo Shenstone and Thomson and Gray. Such derivative pieces, though, make no advance on the originals and are remarkable only as a contrast with Burns's Scots poems. For when he was not imitating Pope and others, Burns was emulating Fergusson—and surpassing him because he imaginatively raised the Scots dialect to an international poetic language.

Not all Burns's poems in an English diction are atrocious, of course; some snatches of song, some epitaphs and epigrams, and the English passage in 'Tam o Shanter' show he was not always insipid when writing in English, but these are brief bursts, odd exceptions to the rule. Similarly, not all Burns's poems 'chiefly in the Scottish dialect' are masterpieces but enough of them are to show that for Burns (as for few other poets) Scots was a poetic language capable of expressing any feeling—or thought—that excited him.