Burns's Comedy of Romantic Love

Abstract

Though Burns enunciated no critical precepts on the comedy of love, he composed much of his best poetry not only within the eighteenth-century sanction of aggressive wit but also according to the tradition of humor as it later became associated with the distinctively Romantic expression of the comic spirit. Illustrative poems and letters reveal his mirthful delineation of human affection. With extraordinary insight into the realities of amatory experience, he treated a rich variety of subjects—the multifarious joys and problems of courtship, unrestrained passion, adultery, unwed parenthood, marriage, artificial conventions and morals, alcoholic stimulation, and defiance of social hypocrisy. His sympathy with the essential seriousness of love counterbalanced a perceptive awareness of human frailties; his basically empathic approach to the dilemmas of love often coalesced with portrayals of ludicrous situations or character traits that invited laughter. It was the fusion of these seemingly antithetical elements that impressed his nineteenth-century admirers, and this outstanding achievement has become increasingly significant in the light of more recent psychological analyses.