![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Once Henry Mackenzie had published his famous review in The Lounger, ‘Burns’ became virtually synonymous with ‘ploughman’, while his literary brilliance was attributed, ironically enough, not to his own careful labour but to Heaven. As Donald Low, whose own name may have sensitised him to this recurrent feature of the early critical reception, observed, ‘the subject most often under discussion was not a body of poetry but a socio-literary phenomenon’. The brief notice in the New Annual Register struck the keynote when it observed that Burns’s Poems were ‘the productions of a man in a low station of life’, for the Monthly Review ran a piece that dwelt on Burns’s situation, ‘born in a low station, and following laborious employment’, while the Critical Review began with general recollections of ‘poetical productions written by persons in the lower ranks of life’. It is not surprising, then, that the early responses to Burns’s work were conditioned by thoughts of agricultural labour and cultural limitation. The Challenge of Regional Language and the Legacy of Robert Burnsīurns’s preface to the Kilmarnock edition emphasised that his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect had been composed ‘amid the toils and fatigues of a laborious life’ and begged readers, accordingly, to ‘make every allowance’ for his humble ‘Education and Circumstances of Life’. ![]()
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