Not for the easily-shocked, but a fascinating insight into the bawdier poems of Robert Burns, Scotland's national bard. ( )

Reprint of the Cunningham Manuscript, a supressed collection of bawdy Scots songs compiled and revised by Robert Burns, and known only by spurious editions of this title. Legman apparently recovered the manuscript on the back of one of the editions in the British Museum. Half of this book is Introduction and virtually page-by-page Notes on the erotic folk songs. These are glass-tipling wench-tipping ballads.
The author's Introduction explores the mystery of what blow felled Burn's muse after his visit to Edinburgh in 1786 [viii ff]. His poetic production extended over little more than two years [x]. The author seems to conclude, with surprisingly little evidence, that the artistic powers succumbed to "malaise" and "the unbalancing effect of sudden lionization" by a snob society and ornate conventions of literary arbiters [x].
Life is complicated. Burns had clearly sided with Thomas Paine and the early Jacobins, and was clearly forced, to keep his paltry job as exciseman, to deny it. The anti-patrician anthem, "A MAN'S A MAN FOR A' THAT", had to be published posthumously [xiii].
Burns did seek to be apolitical, perhaps accepting his minor berth on the ship of state as ploughman, and as a keen observer of his great countryman's fate, after attempted parliamentary reform, of the Scottish advocate, Thomas Muir -- transported on a prison ship to Botany Bay for 14 years [xiv, xiii].
The author also acknowledges the influence of the women in Burns' life -- they are the elephants in the room. Mrs. Agnes Maclehose, known as "Clarinda", was separated from her husband, a Glasgow lawyer. The intimacy of this connection to blue-stocking patrician ambition may have prevented him from returning whole-heartedly to the farm and his "country" wife, Jean Armour. In any event, he had materially failed on the farm. Burns rooted in more than Scottish countryside, and had "at least" nine natural children. To his credit, the author treats evenly the documents which establish the hypocrisy, the desparate and to be fair uncharacteristic pawkiness of Burns' behavior in making solemn oaths to Jean which gainsaid the plans he had already made with Clarinda. (See letters reprinted in The Hornbook. xvi-xvii).
It was during this period of collapse (of his own muse) that Burns undertook to collect the bawdy folksongs -- which finally appeared in the Merry Muses publication [xix]. Burns worked without renumeration [xxi] as editor and re-writer of the lyrics. This "addiction" to collecting songs and re-writing them was a coordinate enterprise performed as a kind of patriotism. In doing so, of course, Burns appears to be one of the most prolific wholesale bowdlerizers of folksong on record [xxxvii]. Yet, because of the quality and motives, no literary critic accuses him of being faker or forger, where even Sir Walter Scott did not escape such labels for similar crimes [xxxvii].
As Luther and Wesley complained that "the Devil has all the best tunes", and Protestant Reformers were expurgating the old free-spoke love-songs, Burns took up this effort to preserve the airs of the bawdy songs by adapting the text to the "singability" before mixed audiences of the times [xli].
The last ten years of his life, which ended at the age of 37, was devoted to the compilation of the bawdy songs, and to their expurgation. The latter effort kept the former extent [xlii].
The author notes that the causa mortem was exposure occasioned by falling asleep in a ditch on the way home from a drinking bout [xliii]. Who really knows? The same is said of Shakespear.
We learn from Burn's own hand, and from the excoriations of his enemies, something of the truth, whether Burns was an 'orrible example', or a soul-delighting poet who gave hope to the world. Compare, the particular and signifying Nemesis, George Gilfillan, minister of the Steeple Kirk, Dundee, who wrote of the dying Burns: "...he was desperate and at bay, vomiting forth obscenity, blasphemy, fierce ribaldry and invective...His eloquence, once so pure, even in its wildness and mirth, was now a hideous composite of filth and fire. Death never did a more merciful act than when he closed the most living lips that ever spake in Scotland--the lips of Robert Burns" [xliii]. The most living lips. ( )