Robert Burns and Modern Ulster-Scots Poetry

Abstract

Robert Burns’s influence on Scottish culture and literature is well attested, though in recent years bardology has been counterbalanced by a rising fashion for “bardoclasm”. In Ulster too Burns has featured prominently in official presentations of Ulster-Scots by the Ulster-Scots Agency and other public bodies. High-profile Burns Night concerts are now a staple and TV programmes have been commissioned to mark the occasion. Burns’s image also features prominently on the Ulster-Scots Agency websites and promotional materials. This essay will explore how Burns’s increased visibility in Ulster is replicated in the work of modern poets who use Ulster-Scots in their work. Modern writers from Ulster who use Ulster-Scots tend to have a slightly different relationship to the work of Burns than their predecessors, or modern Scottish writers. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Ulster-Scots writers would have been intimately familiar with the poetry of Robert Burns. In modern Scotland, Scots writing, and Robert Burns especially, features prominently in school curricula. Despite some efforts to incorporate more Scots and Ulster–Scots literature into the school curricula in Ulster, these do not generally feature. This means that Burns and Scottish poetry is introduced, if at all, through less formal channels. Modern Ulster-Scots poetry began in the 1990s with the Ulster-Scots Language Society’s Ullans magazine. The major writers to emerge from this revival were James Fenton and Philip Robinson. The early 2020s has witnessed an upsurge in writing in Ulster-Scots. This essay will explore Burns’s complex influence on this corpus of work. A strand of Ulster-Scots poetry is fairly traditional, with a focus on nostalgic, rural themes and concerns. It may be intuitive to think, therefore, that Burns may feature as part of this. However, it is perhaps in the work of the most self-consciously literary of modern Ulster-Scots writers where Burns’s work is most tangible. There are traces of Burns’s influence in several areas: in the forms and themes used, and in the way in which voice is created. Burns also at times functions as a sort of symbol for the vernacular itself, and provides a source of vindication for writers using a tongue which still often attracts opprobrium and ridicule in popular discourse.