Burns, Whittier, and the "Rustic Bard of New Hampshire": Mediations in Transatlantic Reception and Influence

In 1828, John Greenleaf Whittier saw the first printing of one of his compositions in book-form. Written in Scots and following the Standard Habbie stanza popularized by Robert Burns in the late eighteenth century, Whittier’s “To the ‘Rustic Bard’” reflects a versatile young poet (then twenty-one) experimenting with poetics, language, and form. Burns’s influence on Whittier has been well documented. In critical anthologies of nineteenth-century American poetry, Burns is commonly cited as being influential on Whittier’s poetic development, albeit sometimes in reductive terms where suggestions of “rustic simplicity” and “directness of expression” obscures the aesthetic fluidity and pastoral politics of both poets.1 In Burns criticism, Donald A. Low’s seminal volume The Critical Heritage inaugurated the idea of Whittier as the “American Burns,”