by David Daiches and Christina Keith, and which can be
expected to continue after this bicentenary year. The total
effect of much modern writing on Burns has been to emphasise
what is old and traditional in his work to the detriment of
what is new, and there has been a tendency to ignore the
content of his poems while concentrating either upon their
language or upon what Burns borrowed from Ramsay and
Fergusson, Thomson and Pope. There is no longer any need to
demonstrate Burns's indebtedness to the Scots (or the English)
literary tradition, except incidentally, as part of a wider pur-
pose--to reveal Burns the innovator; nor is there any reason
to fulminate against the imbecilities of the Burns Cult: these
jobs have been well done, and today the critic's task is of quite
a different nature. The present study arose, at least in part,
as a reaction against James K. Baxter's attempt to interpret
Burns in terms of the doctrine of the Poetic Mask. Indeed,
from one point of view, it may be regarded as an extended
meditation upon the following statement of Mr Baxter's:

In attempting to assess the significance of a poem, one must
realize that nearly all poetry is dramatic in character. The
catharsis which a reader experiences could not occur if he felt
the self that the poem expresses to be entirely actual; rather,
the self is the projection of complex associations in the poet's
mind, and the poem enables the reader to make the same pro-
jection. The I of a poem may not exist. Thus, if one regarded
the work of Burns as a poetic credo, one would have to conclude
that he was either insincere or schizophrenic. . . . But the
problem arises from a false conception of the poet's rôle. If
Burns had been permanently committed to any one attitude, he
could not have attained the objectivity necessary to write at all. ²

Though I am willing to express qualified agreement with
Mr Baxter at some points, I am inclined to contradict him at
others. Both as a man and as a poet, Burns did in fact exhibit
that insincerity and schizophrenia which Mr Baxter would
deny him. He sometimes liked to strike rhetorical attitudes, to
"let great folks hear" in both of the senses in which it is possible
to take these four words, but most of his poems are made out of
a highly inconsistent man's battle with the world. Even on the

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