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Nigel Leask Robert Burns and Pastoral: Poetry and Improvement in Late Eighteenth-Century Scotland

This excellent book on Robert Burns offers a rich new contribution to the cultural and intellectual history of the Scottish Enlightenment. Nigel Leask’s departure point is the social world of Burns the tenant farmer in the age of agricultural improvement. By exploring this neglected dimension of the poet’s life, Leask is able to show how Burns reimagined the genre of pastoral to incorporate the experience of rural change and agrarian capitalism. While some scholars have seen only inconsistencies in Burns’s ideology, Leask argues for the radical character of Burns’s poetry. At the heart of this radicalism was Burns’s sympathy for the victims of agricultural improvement, especially the cottagers who worked the land without secure tenure and who were made increasingly redundant when commercial farming shifted towards larger units of production. In a very effective move, Leask compares Burns’s work with that of his contemporary Adam Smith. The effect is syncopating; a great deal of Burns’s poetry can be read as an extended meditation on themes in Smith’s political economy and moral philosophy. Both men were much concerned with the place of the moral sentiments in a commercial age. Though, Burns expressed far more interest in the destructive side of rural change than Smith ever mustered. Leask’s first task in the book is to refigure Burns as a man of the provincial Enlightenment. Against Henry Mackenzie’s famous description of Burns as a ‘‘heaven-taught ploughman,’’ Leask demonstrates how deeply Burns’s work was conditioned by a series of eighteenth-century institutions, including the market town of Ayr with its library society, the Tarbolton Bachelors Club, the Freemason lodge St. David, the ‘‘prose georgics’’ of the agricultural improvement literature, the Kilmarnock printing press, and the egali-