1/19/2023 0 Comments The best melancholy love poem![]() ![]() ![]() The Aristotelian doctrine of Melancholy, according to which all great men were by definition melancholic was very much in vogue, so there was nothing more natural for Currie to assume that Burns had automatically suffered from melancholia: “Indeed the complaint of “melancholy” or “low spirits” appears to be the general attendant of men of genius…occasioned by that exquisite sensibility which proceeds from refined taste.” (xxii) The personal spleen element in the poet’s life and works obscured the other, much more prevalent satirical side for almost two centuries, since Currie’s edition was seminal in establishing the critical heritage of Burns critics. ![]() Burns lived in an era when great men were revered and Currie was convinced of Burns’s genius. As a Freemason, he thought it his duty to help the widow and orphans with a book that would pull at readers’ heartstrings and loosen those of their purses. McGann saw in Burns’s own introductory comments to the poems a desire for the reader to perceive what he called “a larger, psychological unity.” (7) However, unfortunately for Burns, these comments and to an even greater extent, the poet’s personal letters and notes were used by Burns’s first biographer, Dr James Currie, to impart a skewed view of the bard, one which out of motives of piety and prejudice totally distorted the life and aims of Burns. Jerome McGann underlined the flourishing of a literary cult of personality in the eighteenth century and cited Burns as the classic example of the personal poet among the pre-Romantics. Burns triumphed over the temptation of melancholic self-absorption by subverting the genres most closely associated with melancholy and adopting an ironic, often satirical stance and a mocking tone, more akin to an impish sense of Fun than Mirth, for it is the sound of Burns’s own laughter, exorcising his demons, that echoes through his poems.Ĥ Enlightenment theories which sought to fix strong links between an author and his text established biographical investigation as a primary critical methodology. The choice of “Mirth” as a close associate of “Melancholy”, a happy alliterative pairing subsequently adopted also by Professor John Wilson in his 1843 essay On the Genius and Character of Robert Burns and which provided the professor with many occasions to wax lyrical about Burns’s mirthful or melancholy moods, was perhaps incorrect. He was, however, to be tarred with the brush of the historical melancholy of the Highlands and the radical, dissenting Lowlander disappeared from view.ģBurns’s melancholy is arguably as much, if indeed not more of an affected literary pose as the poetical expression of a passing mood. Well before Hugh MacDiarmid, Burns imagined an idealised Scotland in which the duality and integrity of Scottish poetry was highlighted in relation to that of its more prestigious neighbour. In Burns’s day Scotland was trying hard to come to terms with a concentric nationalism within the Union, created in 1707.Ģ Burns’s poetry and songs are an attempt to forge a new Scotland, its diverse facets united in an all-embracing identity. ![]() Scottish duality is still prevalent in the Highland-Lowland divide, the Catholic-Protestant rivalry, the linguistic differences Scots versus Gaelic, the English and Scottish competition for power, the past battling with the present in the search for a national identity free from myth and a sense of failure. 1When Allan Cunningham concluded his 1834 Life of Burns with this critical judgement of Robert Burns’s poetry he was in fact summing up the schizophrenic nature of the Scottish character and identity. ![]()
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