ABSTRACT
This chapter seeks to address some questions by evaluating transatlantic critical and creative responses to Robert Burns's work. The potentially interesting source of information regarding Burns's early indeed precisely portable, political reputation for North America is the work of others fleeing repression in the British Isles of the 1790s. If in nineteenth-century Britain ideas become increasingly problematic leading to crises in political and religious confidence, in the United States there is a similar turning away from troublingly rational intellect. If the Victorians were to become increasingly angst-ridden in the face of troubling developments in natural and political science, the response to the same in the United States often took the form of a transcendental individualism which was often rapturous. In Canada, as in Scotland, Burns is sometimes implicated in reading of native literary tradition that emphasizes its own inferiority. This notes Canadian criticism is largely at odds with Burns's reception in the criticism of United States, where Burns's supposed primitivism.
