National Poet – Poet of Humanity

As noted in the introductory chapter, Whatley writes of a ‘resurgence of enthusiasm’ for raising statues in the wake of the 100-year anniversary of Burns birth in 1859. The focus of his study is on the period 1877–98, bookend years that also happen to be those in which the hero buildings examined in this chapter, the Kilmarnock Burns Monument and the National Burns Monument in Mauchline, were respectively commenced and completed. As demonstrated here, the construction of hero buildings had a longer tradition than that of merely raising statues, and so cannot be seen as simply an extension or logical next step up from carving statuary. Nonetheless, this second period of Burns architectural monument-building seems to be more strictly related to ‘the narratives concerned with the “recreation of Scotland as a nation”, and “civic nationalism” in the second half of the nineteenth century’, which Whatley identifies as thematic in ‘the campaigns for statues’. ¹