ABSTRACT
If Whitman is naive or self-serving in his discerning of "unfinish, careless nudity, slovenly hiatus" in Robert Burns's work, he appreciates Burns's crucial love of vernacular language "His brightest hit is the use of the Scotch patois" and he relishes "the home-brew'd flavor of the Scotch vernacular" so that in Burns, surely, he detects his own lineaments: aspects of Scotland's bard which can be translated, re-formed, re-sounded by America's bard. If Burns in any sense today might be America's bard, the author wish it were as one of the world's great love poets; as a poet of community; as poet of radically democratic politics. Burns was probably the first major poet Frost's Scottish mother read to him in his Californian childhood, and long before Frost came to be accepted by wide international public as New England's, or even America's bard, he was writing in 1894 to New York magazine editor, making most of his Burnsian position as a rural farmer-poet.
