SOURCE: "Robert Burns," in Naturalism in English Poetry, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1920, pp. 113-34.

In the following essay Brooke praises Burns as the first writer to achieve naturalism in his Scottish poems, the restorer of passion to poetry, and the master of sincerity, pathos, and stinging satire.

Robert Burns, of whom Scotland is justly proud, was the child of his own country, and his poetic ancestors were not English, but Scottish. When I say that—and I shall enlarge on it afterwards—I exclude the poetry he wrote in ordinary English, in which he did not use his native dialect. These poems, in verse, diction and manner, are full of English echoes, and derive from Shenstone, Gray and others of that time. The only distinctive element they have is that now and then the irrepressible genius of the man, his rustic, national individuality, bursts, like a sudden gush...