ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that the two of Robert Burns's self-images in particular color his transatlantic poetic 'afterlives': two versions chronologically separated by the publication and Edinburgh success of his poetry. Burns's transatlantic afterlives emerge in the writing of emigrants who may have carried copies of the poet amongst their precious and scant possessions, who may have bought copies of the early American reprints of his works or who may simply have heard stories of the poet, or recited or sung his work. The bio-poetical conflation would also authorize a shape and meaning for the lives of the emigrant poets who left Scotland to escape hardship and practice their vocation in America. A compound resonance of the biography and memory structures the transatlantic afterlives of the "figure of Burns" which simultaneously instantiated and diverted the political implications of the class and economic pressures driving the nineteenth-century emigration.
