[Here, White examines Burns's struggle to reconcile "the English literary tradition with which alone his formal education was concerned, and the Scottish literary tradition as he encountered it."]

"There are gains for all our losses; /There is balm for every pain." So a now largely unremembered poet of the previous century assures us. We need the assurance. For if we are led, by any unusual stimulation of the mind and the imagination, to see our world reflected in the mirror of another time, we incline to think the poet's assurance in vain. Too often we find ourselves lamenting the losses, not celebrating the gains, and feeling the pain rather than the balm….

Burns is commonly thought by the uninstructed to be—in the phrase applied by Milton to Shakespeare—"Fancy's child", ignorant and spontaneous, warbling his "native wood notes wild". This impression is mistaken, at best an oversimplification, at worst a gross error. Burns was heir not of one but of two different and sharply opposed traditions: the English literary tradition with which alone his formal education was concerned, and the Scottish literary tradition as he encountered it. Mr. [David] Daiches [in his Robert Burns and His World, 1972] briefly but cogently sketches the historical development of both traditions, their relationship to each other, and the effect of both on Burns's work.

On the one hand, Burns was faced with the demand of the Scottish Enlightenment that he write in pure standard English; for these men regarded their native tongue as corrupt and despised the verse written in Scots dialect by Burns's predecessors, Robert Fergusson and Allan Ramsay. But, says Mr. Daiches, "poetry demands that the whole man speak and therefore requires a language which, however different from the spoken vernacular, is not deliberately cut off from it." So, although Burns had already written several poems in the neo-classic idiom preferred by the Edinburgh arbiters of taste, if he had written consistently in this style "he would have been remembered, if at all, as a very minor eighteenth-century English versifier."

On the other hand, Burns was no untutored peasant, ignorant of the long and rich tradition of English poetry—a pose he sometimes liked to adopt. He had learned much of that tradition, for from the beginning he was a poetic craftsman whose letters reveal the most precise concern with wording and rhythm. If he rejected the canons of the literati, this does not mean that he produced vernacular poetry based entirely on the spoken Scots of Ayrshire. Rather, he learned from Fergusson to produce his own combination of Scots and English, of the colloquial and the literary. He steered a canny course between the Charybdis of a learned sterility and the Scylla of a primitive and "natural" vernacular.

This analysis of the historical and literary situation of Burns's time and place does more than characterize his problem and his achievement: it suggests also questions and even perhaps answers of interest to everyone concerned with literature and with education today. First of all, notice that this Ayrshire peasant, his father a bankrupt tenant farmer, so poor in youth that he suffered permanent damage to his health from hardship and malnutrition, nevertheless had been taught to read and write from the best models of English prose and poetry then available: from the Bible, Shakespeare, and Milton, from Dryden, Pope, and Thomson, from Gray, Shenstone, and Addison. Consider his tutor's account of his methods of instruction and his aims in teaching:

The books most commonly used in the school were, the Spelling Book, the New Testament, the Bible, Mason's [actually Masson's] Collection of Prose and Verse, and Fisher's English Grammar…. As soon as they were capable of it, I taught them to turn verse into its natural prose order; sometimes to substitute synonimous expressions for poetical words, and to supply all the ellipses. These, you know, are the means of knowing that the pupil understands his author. These are excellent helps to the arrangement of words in sentences, as well as to a variety of expressions.

Compare these materials and this training with the texts and methods now in use in American public schools, especially in the earlier grades, and it is at once apparent that few products of our public school system have had anything like the grounding in the fundamental disciplines of reading, writing, and thinking that Burns enjoyed.

To say this is not to suggest that we can or should wish to return to the conditions of eighteenth-century Scotland; nor to deny that the problems facing educators today are vastly different from and more formidable than any Burns's tutor could have envisioned; nor to assert that the average pupil is a Burns. We might well, however, immersed though we are and must be in the modern world, ponder what values, what goals, what achievements have been jettisoned along the way, and ask whether it was necessary and inevitable that so much be lost. What would Burns, I wonder, have said if anyone in his day had—conceivably!—raised the caw of "elitism"? We know what he thought of a preposterous and intolerant religious elite: we have "Holy Willie's Prayer" to tell us. But what might so gifted a satirist have written about the "Dick and Jane" series, or the content of a fashionable course in Modern Literature at any contemporary university? What would he have said to those who mouth such phrases as "verbal manipulation" to characterize the great intellectual disciplines based on language; those who claim that the university today must concern itself rather with areas of learning hitherto regarded as the province of private and individual experience? The bon vivant who customarily wrote two versions of his folk songs, one for publication, the other for the amusement of the Tarbolton Bachelor's Club, certainly knew—as we are so often told today—that there are other ways of learning besides "verbal manipulation" and other objects for manipulation than words. He might have marvelled, all the same, at a Department of English Language and Literature that granted academic credit for courses exploring such non-verbal modes of learning….

Again, consider Burns's plight as a man of genius, acknowledged and accepted as such but patronized insufferably by the educated members of a snobbish, class-bound society. Burns's social and intellectual life was cut off from his domestic and emotional circumstances, causing him bitter pain and loss, thwarting his virtues, encouraging his vices. Far from a model of bourgeois virtue though he may have been, Burns was not the rake nor irresponsible Bohemian he has often been made out. But his world as he knew it offered no satisfaction nor fulfillment to his whole nature; rather, its elements were set at variance with one another. How much support or real acceptance does our seemingly more tolerant and less hierarchal society offer such a man? Are the lives or the deaths of our poets, on the whole, more edifying? Our acceptance, our tolerance, is for the most part one of the surface only, our artists and intellectuals as lonely and as alone as was Burns.

One clear advantage that Burns enjoyed over any modern stands out in this vivid picture of a poet and his world. Burns knew nature intimately and at first hand, with a casual, matter-of-fact familiarity no longer possible, at least in America. We can ski, go camping or sailing, interest ourselves in ecology, or retire to a cottage on Cape Cod or a cabin in the Tetons. But we use nature as a recreation, or a refuge, or a cause. We cannot know it as Burns did or write of it with the ease, the realism, the unstudied naturalness that give his verse such freshness and spontaneity. Perhaps the same is true of our knowledge of that part of nature called human, and especially of the experience of love. For Burns is a great love poet, concerned above all with the realized moment of experience; his poetry of love is simple, sensuous, and passionate, as a great poet said poetry should be. And this special sense of the reality of emotional or sensuous experience was for him a gift and a grace, not a creed. His love poems are an example and a reproach to young poets of the Now generation, so often either assertive and rhetorical or lost in the tenuous mazes of abstraction….