Mémoires d’Écosse : Keats sur les pas de Burns

Abstract

Keats loved and admired Burns for his terrestrial art, his humour(s), his taste for food and wine, his anatomic sense of verse and his appetite for new experiences. He found in the memory of his soul as well as in the hidden spaces of his cottage, a kindred spirit in terms of life choices and poetic substance.This article deals with the affiliation between the two poets and measures the impact of Burns’s Scottishness on Keats by paying close attention to every beat of their common pulses. Keats travelled to Scotland despite his poor health, in the footsteps of the Scottish bard—a revival in terms of body and culture celebrated by the Romantic poet’s taste in music, dancing, eating and drinking.Both poets also meet on medical grounds around their similar approach to mortality, creation, the essential forces of nature and literary science. In the end, Burns and Keats, sons of Rabelais, ingest and digest poetry in the name of physical pleasure and aesthetic enjoyment leaving us with a generous philosophy of writing and a humorous understanding of how one model-poet can inspire another.