SOURCE: "Spontaneity and the Strategy of Transcendence in Burns's Kilmarnock Verse-Epistles," in Studies in Scottish Literature, Vol. XXIV, 1987, pp. 78-90.

In the following essay, McKenna offers a thematic and structural analysis of Burns's verse-epistles.

As a group, Robert Burns's verse-epistles have been consistently ignored by commentators, or at best have received only passing attention by those who expend their energies in analyzing his better known (and in many cases better) poems and songs. Two notable exceptions to this rule are the essays by John C. Weston ["Burns's Use of The Scots Verse-Epistle Form," Philological Quarterly, 49 (April 1970)] and G. Scott Wilson ["Robert Burns: The Image and the Verse-epistles," in The Art of Robert Burns, edited by R.D.S. Jack and Andrew Noble, 1982]. Weston views the epistles of Ramsay and Hamilton, Fergusson, and Burns in terms of a distinct sub-genre—the Scots verse-epistle—whose conventions Burns inherited and utilized...