Romantic Poet – Enlightenment Poet

In his monograph Robert Burns, Gerard Carruthers ¹ draws our attention to the significance of the ‘poetic technology’, the forms and the ‘stanza vehicles’ that Robert Burns inherits, adopts or adapts in his work. The Christ Kirk stanza and Standard Habbie (latterly, and ahistorically, misnamed the ‘Burns Stanza’) had been forms favoured by earlier poets of Jacobite, Tory and Episcopalian, if not Catholic, sympathies. That Burns chose precisely those poetic frameworks to reupholster with the ‘hodden grey’ material of his native Whiggish Presbyterian culture demonstrates his adeptness at exploiting the tensions and complexities inherent in the question of historical identity. But this lesson holds just as readily for architectural technology as it does for the poetic: the point being surely that there is no such thing as a meaningless structure.