Romantic poetry and the standardization of English Scottish academics like Hugh Blair, Adam Smith, and George Campbell was clear, error-free, purged of obvious rhetorical figures, and smooth Macpherson’s Ossian was just the opposite: as Hugh Blair noted, the style had “no artful transitions, nor full and extended connection of parts”; instead, the narration was “concise, even to abruptness.”16 Blair championed Ossian nevertheless precisely because Ossian’s roughness created a neat divide between ancient poetry, open to aesthetic appreciation, and modern prose, designed for practical goals While standardized British English was neutral, prosaic, polished, and contemporary, the Ossianic English of Scotland was expressive, poetic, rough, and ancient This division allowed Blair and others to retain an arena for Scottish cultural nationalism even as they were simultaneously creating a transnational British identity As Crawford notes, the Ossianic poems, especially as interpreted by Blair, are “a skilled effort at cultural translation, turning Scottish material of an unacceptable kind into a form acceptable to a new British audience.”17 If Blair and Macpherson’s Ossian located the pseudo-Celtic in the legendary past, the Scots of Robert Burns insisted on the continuing vitality of non-standard language varieties In 1786, he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which demonstrated his mastery both of standard English and of Scots, though it was the poems in “the Scottish Dialect” for which he became famous If standardizers agreed on the need to preserve some “liberty” in usage, they also agreed that this liberty did not include Scottish or Irish In most guides to grammar, one of the most cutting comments about errors was that they were “Scottish.” Burns transformed the despised Scottish dialect from the prime example of bad English into the pure voice of supposedly natural poetry There had been peasant poets before Burns, but they typically did not write in dialect; there had been dialect poets before Burns, but they did not claim to be unlettered peasants Burns for the first time linked dialect to a peasant persona (though his actual class position was far more complex than this phrase implies), and, in so doing, provided another alternative to standardized English Burns’s early reviewers regretted his use of Scottish dialect; Henry Mackenzie noted that in Scotland, his dialect “is now read with a difficulty which greatly damps the pleasure of the reader” and that in England “it cannot be read at all.”18 Yet Burns’s dialect, actually a hybrid of standard English and a range of Scottish language varieties, was quickly revalorized as one of his prime attractions Such alternatives to standardized English could be seen as inherently radical insofar as they challenged the presumed universality of standardized English and its ability to represent a unified Great Britain Yet, as I have noted, the standardizers always insisted on the importance of maintaining 83 Cambridge Collections Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008