ABSTRACT
There is no real need to begin with a plea for consideration of Robert Burns as a working-class poet rather than a poet of Scottish nationalism the banner under which he is still most popularly read. These two dangerously definitive archetypal constructions are not mutually exclusive, and in any case, evaluations of Burns as a poet of the working classes have been made since the first publication of his poems and are clearly justified by the content of the poems themselves. The working-class intellectual, overall, is often constructed by popular myth and serious criticism alike as a figure of heroic individuality; and it is the discursive hybridity available to the subaltern, identified in the writings of Cixous and others, that typically affords the working-class intellectual a unique significance and scope that intellectuals from the empowered centre of social class cannot hope to match.
