To a Mouse

Robert Burns wrote during a transitory period in English literature. In 1786, the poets of the Restoration and the first part of the 18th century, such as John Dryden and Alexander Pope, still represented the height of poetic composition. Though these poets had been dead for almost two generations at the time of Burns’s first publication, their perfection of classical verse forms led some critics to believe that there was nothing left to accomplish with poetry.

Burns’s poetry moved away from this focus on technical perfection. Through his interest in folk literature and writing in vernacular languages like Scots, Burns was one of the few poets of his era to demonstrate a way forward. Many of the themes and poetic techniques seen in a poem like “To a Mouse,” including the emphasis on the natural world, spontaneous verse, the value of animals, and the power of emotion, are seen in full bloom in the later Romantic movement. The Romantics, influenced by authors like Burns, constituted a major revolution in poetry, and many of the tenants of Romantic works still inform contemporary poetic conventions.