The situation is similar with regard to his connection with the
so-called "return to nature" in English poetry. Historians have
discerned a new era begun in descriptive poetry with Thomson's
_Seasons_; and in Cowper again, to ignore many intermediates, there is
abundance of faithful portraiture of landscape. But Burns was not
given to set description of their kind, and what he has in common with
them lies in the nature of his detail--the frank actuality of the
images of wind and weather, burn and brae, which form the background
of his human comedy and tragedy. He observed for himself, and he
called things by their own names. In so doing he was once more
following a national tradition, so that he was not "returning" to
nature, since the tradition had never left it; but, on the other hand,
it is reasonable to suppose that Wordsworth, arriving at a somewhat
similar method by a totally different route, found corroboration for
his theories of the simplification needed in the matter and diction of
poetry in the success of the Scottish rustic who showed his youth
How Verse may build a princely throne
On humble truth.
Wordsworth, of course, like the most distinguished of his romantic
contemporaries, found much in nature that Burns never dreamed of; and
even the faithfulness in detail which Burns shared with these poets
reached a point of subtlety and sensuousness far beyond the reach of
his simple and direct epithets.
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