SOURCE: "Don't Look Back: Something Might Be Gaining on You," in The Sewanee Review, Vol. LXXXI, No. 4, Autumn, 1973, pp. 870–74.

Here, White examines Burns's struggle to reconcile "the English literary tradition with which alone his formal education was concerned, and the Scottish literary tradition as he encountered it."

"There are gains for all our losses; /There is balm for every pain." So a now largely unremembered poet of the previous century assures us. We need the assurance. For if we are led, by any unusual stimulation of the mind and the imagination, to see our world reflected in the mirror of another time, we incline to think the poet's assurance in vain. Too often we find ourselves lamenting the losses, not celebrating the gains, and feeling the pain rather than the balm….

Burns is commonly thought by the uninstructed to be—in the phrase applied by Milton to Shakespeare...