[Rexroth was one of the leading pioneers in the revival of jazz and poetry in the San Francisco area during the 1940s and 1950s. His early poetry was greatly influenced by the surrealism of André Breton, but his later verse became more traditional in style and content, though by no means less complex. However, it was as a critic and translator that Rexroth gained prominence in American letters. As a critic, his acute intelligence and wide sympathy allowed him to examine such varied subjects as jazz, Greek mythology, and the Kabbalah. As a translator, Rexroth was largely responsible for introducing the West to both Chinese and Japanese classics. Below, Rexroth describes Burns as a rebel, attributing his frustration to the "conflict between his situation [as a working man] and his potential [as a well-educated man]."]

Robert Burns is a special case in the literature of the British Isles. He is one of the few writers prior to the twentieth century who was a working man. True, he was not a member of the proletariat, but a farmer. He has often been called a peasant poet. In fact his father was a yeoman who went bankrupt trying to establish himself as a moderately large-scale independent farmer. This is a very different background from that of the traditional highland Scottish shepherd or peasant songster. Nonetheless Robert Burns worked hard with his hands most of his life. He was one of the few writers at the end of the eighteenth century to hold fast to the principles of the French Revolution. Liberty, equality and fraternity are warp and woof of the fabric from which all his poems were cut. He was incapable of thinking in any other terms. The reason of course is that in Scotland the small independent proprietor was a decisive influence on the form of the culture and was also, in the tremendous changes at the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, being subject to a process of internal colonization both by the English and by the Scots aristocracy. Burns' father's long struggle and final bankruptcy were not isolated phenomena, but part of a social movement. Far more than the English, the Scottish farmers caught in this historical process were rebellious. They were rebellious because many of them were comparatively well educated.

Burns was taught by a country schoolmaster and learned even the elements of Latin and a smattering of French. Since the mid-eighteenth century was the low point of English secondary and higher education, he was probably a little better educated than the average member of the upper class to the south. It is this conflict between his situation and his potential that made him, like thousands of other Scots, an incorrigible rebel. In France itself the Revolution was not productive of a literature of its own—at least of a very high quality. It has been said that Robert Burns is the only major Jacobin poet. "Jacobin" is easily confused with "Jacobite" and with reason. Scotland is a separate country with its own traditions, and at least back before James the First of England and Sixth of Scotland, its own great literature in its own language. After the final extinction of hopes for a Stuart Restoration, or an autonomous Scotland, in 1745, with the failure of the romantic Bonnie Prince Charlie, and the enforced total union with England, there was a great upsurge of Scottish cultural nationalism. For centuries Scottish writers had thought in one language and written in another. Burns, to preserve his integrity—a vague word, better say the efficient functioning of his sensibility and intelligence—was forced back into the arms of the common people from whom he came. His verse in English is mediocre and sometimes silly. It was so obviously written for the provincial belles of Scottish salons, young ladies who prided themselves on their southern accents and their familiarity with sentimental English novels. For all his efforts to captivate, however, when it came to decision, Burns' love affairs were with women of his own class or classes, daughters of farmers and declassé intellectuals.

Their Scottish language should not mislead one in understanding Burns' longer poems, the great satires, "The Holy Fair," "Holy Willie's Prayer," and his one comic narrative, "Tam o' Shanter." They are not folkloristic but like so much Jacobin poetry, Roman in inspiration. But they differ decidedly from eighteenth-century satirical verse in England or France. Like their Roman models, the English and French wrote about "the Town." Samuel Johnson's satires are scarcely altered translations from the Roman poet Juvenal. Burns satirized the middle class of people, whether farmers, craftsmen, or small merchants. In France the Revolution was struggling to capture power for the middle class. Scotland had evolved a well-organized middle class society almost unnoticed. Its social upheavals had come from outside, from struggle with England. With the exception of Thomas Dekker, who greatly resembles Burns, the English city comedies of the early seventeenth century are written from outside by declassed intellectuals whose sympathies were with the ancien régime. Burns, like Dickens, wrote of the commonality from inside and so his satire had an authenticity and an accuracy which makes it still appropriate.

The long poems are not much read today—few long poems by anybody are. It is for his songs that Burns is famous throughout the world. More than any other one factor they have sustained the cultural consciousness of Scotland. The literary mind is a dangerous thing to turn loose on folklore. The educated editor and adaptor usually spoils whatever he touches. Walter Scott's improvements of the ballads of the Scottish Border, with only one or two exceptions, lessen their sources and rob them of their peculiar wonder. William Morris' adaptations of folklore, ballads and sagas can be read today only with the grimmest effort. Except Burns, only the Finn Elias Lönnrot was able to gather the fragmentary songs and legends of his people and transmute them into something both more wonderful and more socially powerful than the originals. Lönnrot's Kalevala is a different thing than its sources, a haunting, dreamlike, fragmentary epic, really meaningful only to modern Finns. Their ancestors, could they read it, would be vastly puzzled. Burns did something different. He wrote songs in his youth, some of them adaptations of folk songs. In his later years, at the height of his poetic powers, he gathered, edited, altered, expanded, combined hundreds of folk songs. Where he changed, he not only changed for the better, but he changed entirely within the folkloristic context, and intensified the specific glamour and wonder of his sources. Sometimes the song is completely rewritten. "John Anderson, My Jo" is changed from a bawdy song to one of long, enduring married love. "Ca' the Yowes tae the Knowes" is subtly altered line for line—literally glamorized—but always within the context. This is the same context that produced the scalp tingling lines of balladry, "About the mid houre of the nicht she heard the bridles ring," "Half ower Half ower tae Aberdower tis fiftie fathoms deep." Lines like these give the great ballads their stunning impact and their haunting permanence.

Burns is the only literary poet working on folk material who could do anything like this. He did it hundreds of times, so that his poems are not just the only Scottish folksong most people know, even in Scotland, but they establish a sensibility which remains characteristic of the best Scottish poetry to this day. "Yestreen, when tae the tremblin string / The dance gaed thro' the lighted ha'," "While waters wimple tae the sea; / While day blinks in the lift sae hie," "Aft hae I roved by bonnie Doon, / To see the woodbine twine; / And ilka bird sang o'its luve, / And sae did I o'mine," "Had we never loved sae kindly, / Had we never loved sae blindly, / Never met—or never parted, / We had ne'er been broken-hearted." … these lines are not only bathed in the uncanny light of folk song at its best, but they establish the specific tradition we think of as Scottish. The poetry of Hugh MacDiarmid (Scotland's greatest poet since Burns, and now with the passing of all the heroic generation of Modernist poetry in America and Great Britain, one of the two greatest living poets, I was going to say in Britain or America, but actually I suppose in any country) owes everything to this exact glamour, this vein of phosphorescent precious metal first opened up by Burns.

And finally MacDiarmid, the revolutionary nationalist, raises one last point. Burns took the folk songs of Scottish nationalism, of Stuart legitimism, and subtly altered them into something quite different. Jacobite becomes Jacobin "Had Bonnie Prince Charlie won, a regime of barbarism, superstition, and incurable civil war, dominated by a mindless and decayed aristocracy, would have been fastened on Scotland." Nobody believes that today, largely due to the myth established by Burns' subtle rewriting of Jacobite folk-songs. The Stuarts certainly did not believe in freedom of any kind. The songs of their partisans, filtered through the mind of Burns, become battle songs of freedom, hymns to the integrity and independence of the individual—the individual, middle kind of man who is educated, cultivated and yet works for a living—for example, the Scottish engineers who built bridges and railroads and factories, and spread the Industrial Revolution across the world, and who relaxed over a bottle of uisquebaugh in the evening, singing "Scots Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled."