Robert Burns’ work was read widely across the United States in the 19th and 20th centuries. President Abraham Lincoln, the the great emancipator, could recite his poems from memory. At the 1865 annual banquet of Washington D.C.‘s Burns Club, when Lincoln was asked to toast the poet, he replied: “I cannot frame a toast to Burns. I can say nothing worthy of his generous heart and transcending genius. Thinking of what he has said, I cannot say anything which seems worth saying.”
Robert Burns remains today one of the best known poets in Russia, but his fame was even greater during the communist era of the Soviet Union when his working class credentials and radical writings were revered and moulded to fit the party’s governing ideloogy - with the Bard even appearing on a set of stamps. Shortly after the end of the Russian civil war, communist officials approved the translation of more than 200 of Burns’ works into Russian, with the resulting collection selling 600,000 copies when published in 1924. It continued to be a bestseller for the next six decades and was regularly reprinted.
With more than 60 examples dedicated to the Scots poet, Robert Burns is third in line after Christopher Columbus and Queen Victoria in the number of statues dedicated to a non-religious figure worldwide. They can be found everywhere from Leith to Milwaukee.
South of the border, Burns can be found seated in London’s Victoria Embankment Gardens, while a bust of him is also seen in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey. Northern Ireland has one statue of the man erected in Belfast, but the largest number of Burns statues anywhere in the world outside of Scotland can be found even further west in the United States of America.
In 2010, a miniature book of Burns’ poetry has returned to Scotland after a 5.7 million mile trip and 217 orbits of the Earth. The tiny book, less than one-inch high, was presented to First Minister Alex Salmond by astronaut Nick Patrick at Holyrood. The book was sent to space with help from a group of young Scots taking part in the Scottish Space School, an initiative by the University of Strathclyde. The pupils handed the book to Nick in November on a trip to Nasa’s Johnson Space Center in Texas, before he took it onboard STS-130 Endeavour in February on a two-week mission to the International Space Station.
Two of American litreature’s biggest names were confirmed fans of Robert Burns. The title of JD Salinger’s famous 1951 coming-of-age story, Catcher in the Rye, is a reference to the Burns song ‘Comin’ thro’ the Rye’. John Steinbeck’s landmark 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men, is of course named after a line in the poem To a Mouse. Steinbeck has originally planned to call the book Something That Happened, but changed his mind after reading Burns.