Читать книгу The Canongate Burns - Robert Burns - Страница 4

‘The very ink with which all history is written is merely fluid prejudice.’

Mark Twain, Pudd’ nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.

‘I think this enlightened age, as it is called, is as much given to persecution as the most barbarous. The transportation of the Deputies and Directors is not perhaps quite so bad as that of Muir, Palmer, etc., … Men persecute because they love persecution and so far as I am from believing fear to be the true cause of persecution that I begin to think that fear is the only motive that ever can persuade men to suffer those who differ in opinion from them to breathe the same atmosphere with them. This is not pleasant philosophy but I am afraid it is true.’

Charles James Fox to Charles Grey, 1801.

For the first time in over two centuries we have in this single volume all Burns’s surviving poems glossed and annotated. To do such editorial work has been for us a salutary and revealing task. What has fundamentally impressed us has been the tenacity of Burns’s creative drive which, despite all obstacles, sustained a flow of over six hundred poems and songs over a period of twenty-two years. Such productivity also entailed that he constantly metamorphosed his day to day experiences into poetry. Thus, as we annotated the poems, making as much use of that other source of parallel commentary, his quite extraordinary and, arguably, still under valued letters, not only his biographical shape but an encompassing picture of the peculiarly fraught late eighteenth century emerged. As admirable, and even more surprising, is the sustained quality of his poetic achievement. If we compare him to Wordsworth or, even more pertinently, Coleridge, briefly his creative contemporaries and consistent admirers of his genius, Burns achieves a higher ratio of poetry of the first order than either of them.

All this was achieved in opposition to a series of diverse and formidable obstacles. With some few significant exceptions, Burns’s biographers and editors have been, as we shall see, either anodyne or, worse, in some early instances, deliberately mendacious about the harsh physical, social and political environment in which he had to survive as a creative writer. Consequently this edition lays stress on his capacity not only to endure but poetically to overcome the multiple constraints he experienced. Textually and contextually, this edition, therefore, lays unique emphasis, partly by bringing some recently retrieved archival material to bear, on Burns’s necessarily ironic and often oblique political life and poems. Consequent on such a new explication of Burns’s political values and poetry, will be an exploration into the calculated and deeply successful manner in which, from the moment of his death, his achievement as a radically dissenting democratic poet was denied and suppressed. Indeed, what is revealed is the degree to which a whole segment of late-enlightenment liberal, Scottish culture of which Burns was an integral part was, as far as possible, obliterated from the national memory by reactionary forces which were quick to build on their total victory in the 1790s. Burns’s corpse, as we shall see, was not the only thing consigned to the grave in 1796. It is, indeed, a signal example of the fact that the victors do write history.