Was Burns a Labouring-Class Poet?

Abstract

Writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1809, Francis Jeffrey reflected on the widespread contemporary view of Robert Burns as a ‘peasant poet’; ‘certainly by far the greatest of our poetical prodigies — from Stephen Duck down to Thomas Dermody. They are forgotten already; or only remembered for derision. But the name of Burns, if we are not mis¬taken, has not yet “gathered all its fame”.’ Jeffrey canvassed the case for locating Burns in the company of Wiltshire-born Stephen Duck (1705?–1756), tragic paradigm of all eighteenth-century labouring-class poets, and the more contemporary Irish poet-prodigy Thomas Dermody (1772–1802), but dismissed the comparison as deeply misleading: ‘He will never be rightly estimated as a poet, till that vulgar wonder be entirely repressed which was raised on his having been a ploughman’ (Jeffrey, 1809, p. 249).