“Tho’ I to Foreign Lands”: Burns’s Poetry in America, c.1786–1801

Abstract

This chapter shifts attention from Burns’s poetic gaze to how the American reading public would, in turn, come to know and view the Scottish poet,primarily through a thriving print culture on the Eastern seaboard. Sood outlines the early reprinting and reception of individual poems in Philadelphia dailies such as the Pennsylvania Packet, before expanding on how entrepreneurial printers—often of Scottish or Irish heritage—capitalised on an absence of international copyright laws by swiftly reproducing and distributing unauthorised copies of Poems, Chiefly in The Scottish Dialect. Sood concludes the chapter by underlining the transatlantic impact of James Currie’s The Works of Robert Burns, reprinted in several states from 1801 onwards, arguing that Currie’s “transnational agenda” was hugely influential on shaping Burns’s reputational development in nineteenth-century America.