ABSTRACT

The sense of Burns's is not only democratic but republican impulses, that the American Revolution has been granted its proper status in his poetry. Marilyn Butler's excellent, precursive 1997 essay, 'Burns and Politics', marks this sea-change by defining 'poems which praise America as a land of freedom' as one of five principal categories into which Burns's political poetry can be subdivided. Burns's ultimate vision was tragic one in that such American salvation had not taken root in Scotland, in this earlier poem, despite a prevaricating England, he believed that it had. America, thus, is a consistent focus of his political idealism. The consequence of Bruce P. Lenman's argument is the only significant Scottish support for America derived from small group of distant Scottish aristocrats who, along with the Founding Fathers of the American Revolution, spoke, although slightly differently accented, the language of British country Whigs which had evolved as an antidote to an over-centralized, highly militarized, fiscally corrupt metropolitan state.