The W. Ormiston Roy lecture 2024: Robert Burns and patriot rhetoric

This is the text of the W. Ormiston Roy Fellowship Lecture delivered at the University of South Carolina on 23 May 2024 (explanatory footnotes have been added). It addresses Burns’s use, in his verse, of the rhetoric of ‘Patriot’ opposition to the British fiscal-military state, and begins by describing this rhetoric and sketching its origins. As a model for understanding Burns’s appropriation of this discourse the lecture then shows how this is done in two poems by Anna Barbauld. It argues that the value of this rhetoric for both Barbauld and Burns lay in its offering them a place from which they could address a national (British) public, despite their exclusion, by their gender and their social rank respectively, from the political class. The lecture concludes by considering two poems, unpublished in Burns’s lifetime, in which he mourns the loss of this possibility in the aftermath of the French Revolution (‘An irregular Ode for General Washington’s birth-day’), and notes the moral vanity in the enfranchised classes that it permits (‘On Glenriddel’s Fox breaking his chain’).