“Thy Harp, Columbia”: Burns’s American Works, c.1784–1794
In this chapter, Sood outlines the formative links between Burns and the USA by resituating the poet in the transnational context in which he lived. Sood begins with a discussion of how, in the late-eighteenth century, the dialectical idea of America—as both a metaphorical and geo-physical space—was regularly intertwined in personal, political and, most crucially for Burns, poetic processes of self-inquiry and disquisition. A critical examination of select letters, and poems, including “When Guilford Good” (1784), “Address of Beelzebub” (1786) and “Ode For General Washington’s Birthday” (1794), provides a sense of the complexity of Burns’s poetic engagement with the early Republic over the course of a decade.