SOURCE: "Dialect and Diction in Burns," in A Burns Companion, Macmillan Academic and Professional Ltd., 1991, pp. 79-88.

In this essay, Bold contends that Burns's poems written in the Scots dialect are superior to those he wrote in English.

In a book generally dismissive of Scots as a literary language, Edwin Muir suggested that when he 'wished to express his real judgement [Burns] turned to English' (Edwin Muir, Scott and Scotland, 1936). Muir's supposition that, for Burns, Scots was 'a language for sentiment but not for thought' simply ignores the evidence of Burns's poetry in pursuit of the argument that, since the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, the Scottish people had felt in Scots and thought in English. Muir's patronising remarks about Burns's Scots verse are as crass as those the poet had to put up with in his lifetime, as an anecdote illustrates.

On 1 February 1787 the 11th Earl of...