SOURCE: "Robert Burns's Declining Fame," in Studies in Romanticism, Vol. 11, No. 3, Summer, 1972, pp. 207–24.

In the following essay, Bentman contends that Burns's poetry is a significant part of British literary history, despite his declining popularity in recent decades.

Robert Burns's poetry is all but ignored in current scholarship of British literature. During the past twenty-five years, critics and scholars have often acted as if his poetry did not exist or have treated him as if he were a poet worth scant attention. This recent indifference to Burns's poetry has not been effected, as is usual in such instances of declining fame, by a critical downgrading of his work. It seems, rather, to result from an assumption that Burns is not in a British tradition. He is ignored because he is considered either to be in a purely Scottish tradition or to be one of those rare poets who are...