• Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar
  • Skip to footer

Association for Scottish Literature

Scottish Literature's International Voice

  • Home
  • News
  • About
    • ASL Council Members
    • Honorary Fellowships
  • Publications
    • Author submissions
    • Books
      • Annual Volumes
      • Free Publications
      • International Companions to Scottish Literature
      • New Writing Scotland
      • Occasional Papers
      • Scotnotes Study Guides
      • Other titles
    • Periodicals
      • Scottish Literary Review
      • Scottish Language
      • The Bottle Imp
    • Articles
    • Audio
  • Events
    • ASL Book Launches
    • ASL Conferences
    • ASL Lectures
  • Schools
    • Videos
      • Schools Conference: 2021
      • Schools Conference: 2020
      • Schools Conference: 2019
      • Schools Conference: 2018
      • Schools Conference: 2017
      • Schools Conference: 2016
      • Schools Conference: 2015
      • Schools Conference: 2014
      • Schools Conference: 2013
      • Strange Tales: Three Uncanny Stories by Robert Louis Stevenson
      • Tally’s Blood
    • Free Publications
    • Schools Conference
    • Scotnotes Study Guides
    • Teaching Notes
    • Teaching Units
    • Voices of Scotland
  • Contact
    • Author Submissions
  • Join the ASL
Home / Publications / Books / Scotnotes Study Guides / Scotnote 9

Scotnote 9

ROBERT BURNS

Kenneth Simpson

Published in: Paperback.
By: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1994
Price: £5.95
ISBN 978-0-948877-22-3

Order from our bookshop


Click here to watch Robert Crawford’s talk on the poetry of Robert Burns plus other videos from the 2014 ASLS Schools Conference.


Robert Burns is perhaps Scotland’s foremost cultural icon, and is the world’s most widely celebrated poet. Sometimes his fame – and his face on all those teatowels – stands in the way of an appreciation of the sheer scope of his genius. Although occasionally derided by ignorant and unthinking persons as “doggerel”, Burns’s poetry contains great depths of humanity, philosophy, humour and rare beauty.

Kenneth Simpson’s Scotnote provides students with a brief and authoritative introduction to Burns, his life and his work.

CONTENTS

  • Myth and poet
  • Poet and community
  • Satire and sentiment
  • The poet’s voices
  • Burns and the supernatural
  • Burns and song
  • References
  • Bibliography
  • Index of poems and songs

Primary Sidebar

Retrieving and Renewing: a poem for ASL

   Forget your literature? – forget your soul.
   If you want to see your country hale and whole
   Turn back the pages of fourteen hundred years.
   Surely not? Oh yes, did you expect woad and spears?
   In Altus Prosator the bristly blustery land
   Bursts in buzz and fouth within a grand
   Music of metrical thought. Breathes there the man
   With soul so dead—? Probably! But a scan
   Would show his fault was ignorance:
   Don’t follow him. Cosmic circumstance
   Hides in nearest, most ordinary things.
   Find Scotland – find inalienable springs.
  Edwin Morgan, 2004

Footer

Follow Us

  • Facebook
  • Instagram
  • Twitter
  • YouTube

Archives

ASL
Department of Scottish Literature
University of Glasgow
7 University Gardens
Glasgow G12 8QH
Scotland
Phone/Fax: +44 (0) 141 330 5309

© 2022 Association of Scottish Literature · Developed by TRWA ·