‘The Art of Easy Writing’: The Case of Burns and Byron

Abstract

This article focuses on several unexplored relationships between the poetry of Robert Burns and Lord Byron. In the first part of the article, I discuss how Burns and Byron manipulated their chosen verse forms to perform an ironic account of their own productions, which are often critical not only of conventional tastes, but also of their role as poets. In the second part of this article, I turn to two satires: ‘A Dream’, a poem that featured in Burns’s debut volume, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), and Byron’s ‘The Vision of Judgment’ (1822). Here I explore the shared satiric sympathies of the poets, examining how Burns’s and Byron’s satires reflect a similarity in temperament and geniality, despite criticising political or poetic foes, namely King George III and Robert Southey.