THE POET BURNS

King Country Chronicle, Volume XXX, Issue 4845, 14 May 1936, Page 6

THE POET BURNS

A GERMAN ADMIRER. It is somewhat unexpected to find a German scholar as author of a book on Robert Burns, but Professor Plans Hecht has made a detailed study of the Scottish poet, his work, life, and limes. In a final summing up in the English translation of the book, published by Hodge, Professor Hecht says:— " Into little more than 37 years of life there is compressed such a wealth of love and sorrow, of passion, success and disappointment, of errors j and truimphs, as seldom falls to the lot of one individual. Burns' short J

career reflects the image of his age, with its limitations, its mistakes, its great thoughts and attainments. His personality is as interesting from the human point of view as from the literary. " The two elements cannot be considered apart; they are permeated his influence on posterity. He has with the same burning passion, the same pride, and the same manliness. His artistic mission is unmistakable; it consists in the revival, poetic purification, and interpretation of the customs, songs, and legends of his native land, a task for which Nature had endowed him with brilliant and incomparable gifts. "He was not always successful in achieving the full lucidity of his own peculiar style, and his poetry resembles his life in that it often strayed from the right path, and as a result bears the scars of many a voluntary and involuntary compromise, and lacks the ultimate purification and the final harmony of perfection.

" He took a literary tradition that was confined within the bounds of a too narrow realism and developed it to its furthest possible limits by infusing it with his own spirit, which was gripped and inspired by the great ideas of the time, and which reached out towards the universal.* " This is not the place to speak of been granted the happiest lot that can fall to any poet: he is enshrined for ever in the hearts of his fellowcountrymen, and-has become such an essential part of their spiritual possessions that it is impossible to imaI gine Scotland without Robert Burns. He has remained a living force in the nation. The sun that rose over the grave by the churchyard wall in Dumfries was the sun of immortality."