in his preface, as an uneducated peasant whose inspiration came solely from heaven. He was very well educated, but he shrewdly judged that the "literati" of Edinburgh would be more favorably disposed toward an unlettered farmer poet, a "phenomenon." He was right. His poems were enthusiastically received both by simple country people and by the sophisticated critics of the Scottish Enlightenment. In a review of the poems by Henry Mackenzie, Burns was called a "Heaven-taught ploughman," and he was beckoned to Edinburgh as an example of the genius of the natural man. He was glad to accept that rolefor a time and up to a point. Sometimes when he was condescended to and patronized by people of wealth and position whose intellects he knew to be inferior to his own, he let the pose drop, and he was then accused of arrogance.
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All this is reflected in Burns's poetry, which moves between conventional sentimental verse in Augustan English and lively Scots, with varying mixtures. One might say that the complexities of Scottish culture in his daywith educated people still speaking Scots but writing in standard Englishforced a degree of role taking on Burns. At any rate, he was adept at it. He could play the role of the complete anarchist"a fig for those by law protected"as in his "Cantata"
Love and Liberty
(generally known as
The Jolly Beggars
). He could write songs against the Union of 1707, belligerent patriotic pieces like "Scots Wha Hae," he could play the sentimental Jacobite lamenting the lost Stuarts, and he could also sound the note of loyal British patriotism. After being lionized in Edinburgh, Burns felt unsettled and restless, and although he returned to farming, he was not successful. He succeeded finally in obtaining a position as an excise officer, which he held to the end of his life in spite of getting into trouble politically over his sympathy with the French Revolution.
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Besides his satires, verse letters, animal poems, and poetry of popular celebration, Burns wrote one superb narrative poem,
Tam o' Shanter
, based on an Ayrshire folk story. In octosyllabic couplets with cunningly varied diction, from vivid colloquial Scots to formal English, the poem alters the speed of its narrative as it moves from description of a cozy pub interior to the storm outside, then to the dance of the witches, then to the frenzied pursuit of Tam when he is discovered watching them. A masterpiece of carefully patterned voices, the poem ends with a mock moral, and this ironically pretentious moralizing note sounds intermittently throughout.
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