THE BURNSIAN CONSTRUCTS (Research in progress) In his monograph Robert Burns, Carruthers draws our attention to the significance of the ‘poetic technology’, the forms and the ‘stanza vehicles’ that the poet inherits, adopts or adapts in his work. The Christ Kirk stanza and Standard Habbie (latterly, and ahistorically misnamed the ‘Burns Stanza’) had been forms favoured by earlier poets of Jacobite, Tory, and Episcopalian, if not Catholic, sympathies. That Burns chose precisely those poetic frameworks to reupholster with the ‘hodden grey’ material of his Whiggish Presbyterian culture demonstrates his adeptness at exploiting the tensions and complexities inherent in the question of historical identity. But this lesson holds just as readily for architectural technology as it does for the poetic: the point being surely that there is no such thing as a meaningless structure. The purpose of this essay is to look across the country emboldened with this lesson, and to examine the physical structures which were raised in honour of, or in some way to memorialise, Robert Burns. The poet died at the close of the 18th century, and since that time – and especially through the 19th century – monuments and memorials have been raised not only throughout Scotland, but across all those countries significantly influenced by a Scottish Diaspora – Northern Ireland, Canada, USA, Australia, New Zealand, etc. Even this work abroad provided many commissions for 19th century Scots sculptors like Steell and Stevenson, but the irony is that most of their work was based on an original sculpture by the English neo-classical artist Flaxman, which was initially housed in Hamilton’s Edinburgh monument, and was modelled in its turn on Nasmyth’s portrait. What interests us here however, are the purely architectural works which were erected either alongside those sculptures or in their own right as memorials. Although it’s true that facsimile versions of the Burns birth cottage, complete with thackit roof, were constructed using plans and drawings of the original in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1910, and in St Louis (later moved to Portland, Oregon), and some sculptures like the Boston of 1911 are complemented by an architectural element, it is fair to say that the main architectural memorials are all sited within Scotland, and include the Dumfries Mausoleum, and the Alloway, Edinburgh,
By Johnny Rodger Kilmarnock and Mauchline monuments (all examined here below). Goodwillie in his book The World’s Memorials of Robert Burns (Waverley publishing 1911) provides an extensive and often witty catalogue to most monuments, sculptural and architectural, built to the poet by that date. In the 1989 Burns Chronicle there is also a more complete list of monuments compiled by J. McKay. There is however no real critical engagement or placing of the work in the historical context of an architectural, literary or plastic arts tradition either in Goodwillie or elsewhere. While the sculptures may communicate fairly clear discourses of meaning in terms of their physical and bodily representation of the poet’s person (after Flaxman after Nasmyth) accompanied by various symbolic accoutrements like the pen, the plaid, the daisy, and (in Dumfries for example) one of the twa dogs, an analysis of the significance of the purely architectural monuments, of their meaning for Burns himself, for his work, for his readership – for his homeland and his compatriots at large – remains to be essayed. Perhaps we should start by asking what can be the scope for a monument to a poet? Is the monument figured as an architectonic representation of the poet himself, of his literary work, or of the readership and their relationship to that work? In Burns’s case there is perhaps no simple answer to that question, but there are nonetheless some models with which we can make comparison and attempt to clarify the architectural intentions here. Among the most well-known monumental spatial and architectural works created by poets in the 20th century, are the gardens by Ian Hamilton Finlay and Gabriele D’Annunzio, respectively Little Sparta in SW Scotland and Il Vittoriale degli Italiani in north Italy. Leaving to one side the question of the ‘success’ of these works (and the dubious taste of D’Annunzio’s work, described by one commentator, Fred Licht, as a ‘Fascist Lunapark’) the point is that they are presented as poetry itself, they are not merely architectural representations of literary work that exists in written form elsewhere. Finlay indeed described himself in his work in laying out the garden, and arranging sculptural and architectural pieces, as a poet, and appeared to see that work as merely a continuation of his earlier written work. Clearly
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