Dialect and Diction in Burns

Abstract

In a book generally dismissive of Scots as a literary language, Edwin Muir suggested that when he ‘wished to express his real judgement [Burns] turned to English’ (Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland, 1936; rept. Edinburgh, 1982, p. 12). Muir’s supposition that, for Burns, Scots was ‘a language for sentiment but not for thought’ (op. cit., p. 13) simply ignores the evidence of Burns’s poetry in pursuit of the argument that, since the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Scottish people had felt in Scots and thought in English. Muir’s patronising remarks about Burns’s Scots verse are as crass as those the poet had to put up with in his lifetime, as an anecdote illustrates.