ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Robert Burns's own adaptations of Scots adages and his "aphorization" sententious isolation and condensing of memorable moments from canonical English poets and scripture. It considers the lucky chance by which later authors outside Scotland have drawn on aphorisms from Burns as touchstones for their own work. An aphorism user remembers a saying and passes it along; a poet devises a saying striking enough to descend to posterity as memorable. The aphorisms extracted from Burns's own poems that still circulate today, separated from their original and often equivocal matrix of counter-statement, therefore preserve only a partial view even of Burns's characters, let alone of the poet himself. The poems that Burns signed were addressed to the literati at large; his autobiographical letter remembers his awe in adolescence at the thought of making "verses like printed ones, composed by men who had Latin and Greek".
