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ibr their b ^ st powers . We should rather s ay , perhaps , that they jonly . occupy an inferior rank , ' . because their mental constitutions - were ; not matured by city poverty to qualify them for the most ^ powerful composition in this species- of poetry . They are too wierely pastoraly— 'their subjects are not soul-stirring , —they deal in what Burns despised : —
Shepherds pipes , Arcadian strains , And fabled tortures , quaint and tame . ' But Burns was quite another-guess sort of man . He first saw , , irt their real nature and extent , the peculiar topics of the poet of poverty , and prepared the way for the yet mote extended range rwhich has been taken by our author . The education which he obtained for himself was not that which passes for education with
the wealthy and fashionable : he seldom wandered towiards the region of classicality , and when he did he was sure to lose himself . Rightly did he repent of having ever put such names as Chloris and Daphne into his nervous rhymes . A few good English books , histories , essays , and poems , these he devoured , ' unrnixed with baser matter , ' or with foreign matter ; and his strong constitution
became all the stronger . The leading topics 6 f his poetry fire precisely those which , without reference to an individual instance , we should have marked out as the proper themes for one who would achieve the highest honours of the poet of poverty * They are what we have already referred to as the universal elements of poetry , freed from the modifications which belong to an educated taste , and coloured with the modifications which belong to the
condition of those who toil . He looked on nature with the freshness of a first love ; The mountain on whose outline he gazed was not to him a peg on which to hang school quotations and allusions . The emotions with which rocks , woods , and streams inspired him , were , like the rocks themselves , primary , and not secondary . They were not the debris of an old world of poetry . His associations with scenery were those of humanity . With the exception of a little Scotch history , he sang nature as Adam would have
sung it , had Adam been created a poet . Nor w&s his Ibve , the next great universal topic , much more conventional ; although it must be deplored that he lowered it towards the degraded regions of physical instinct . He loved as alsd Adam would have loved , had there been twenty Eves in the world instead of one J but Adam was only a natural man , —Burns was also a pdor man . When he looked on the fields , he felt that they were appropriated ; when he loved , he therefore * also hated . Whether animate or
inanimate , he sang of beauty as he felt it , # nd of oppression too , in the language of keen perception and intense pasajon . For Burns was a politician : his clear mind saw at once the absurdity of excluding from poetry the subjects by which social man is most engrossingly occupied , and njost stormily agitated ; he set the ^ xsm ple of writing on these subjects , not as the laureate of 3
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394 The Poot and their Poefrif .
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Citation
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Monthly Repository (1806-1838) and Unitarian Chronicle (1832-1833), March 2, 1832, page 194, in the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008; 2018) ncse.ac.uk/periodicals/mruc/issues/vm2-ncseproduct1808/page/50/
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