A Technical Note

Abstract

The best-known works of Burns - ‘To a Mouse’, the verse epistles, the songs, ‘Tam o Shanter’ - give an impression of a poet who, however revolutionary in politics, was conservative in technique. These poems suggest that Burns was content with the Standard Habbie stanza, the quatrain and the octosyllabic couplet. The impression of metrical caution is misleading, based on an inadequate knowledge the poetry. Ridiculing Bardolators in A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle (1926) Hugh MacDiarmid scoffed ‘No’ wan in fifty kens a wurd Burns wrote’ and he was partially right. In a later poem, To Circumjack Cencrastus (1930), MacDiarmid described Bums as ‘That Langfellow in a’ but leid’ (that Longfellow in all but song) and he was completely wrong.