Robert Burns and ‘Circling Time’

Abstract

Featuring an extended reading of ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, this chapter finds new parallels between Robert Burns’s handling of the religious and socio-economic dimensions of improvement. It argues that the poem maps a model of spiritual renewal rooted in New Licht Presbyterianism on to the crisis of laissez-faire modernisation. That vision of improvement is signalled in the work by a complex overlaying of linear and cyclical models of time, a dialectical vision of history in which – finally – poetry ascends to a powerful role as a medium of secular belonging. ‘The Cotter’ thus instantiates a complex cultural politics, rather than being a conservative outlier in Burns’s oeuvre. It is contextualised here within the poet’s wider negotiation of improvement in his 1786 Poems, which develops a carefully managed ‘simple’ aesthetics. Burns emerges as a transitional figure between the improving civic activity of the Scottish Enlightenment (‘cultivating’) and an aesthetic vocabulary of nationhood driven by the consumption of canonical literature (‘culture’).