As Marilyn Butler has claimed, ‘Burns's social position and his self-presentation, the […] traditional language, verse-forms and metres, are all in the end political.’ Burns's ‘political’ construction of himself as a poet, especially as a primitive bard (collaborated in by so many others), or at best an autodidact is, however, not entirely encouraging to the reception of the subtleties in his work. If the notion of Burns as an essentially untutored rustic poet has gradually receded (though it took until well into the nineteenth century before a more ‘literary’ Burns began to be appreciated), the idea of Burns as a rather one-dimensional ideological or ‘party’ animal remains. For instance, Burns has been seen, and remains to be seen in much popular mythology, as a somewhat backward looking ‘nationalist’, a term and a modern political concept to which Burns had no real access. He is, at least, what we would today call a ‘cultural nationalist’ in adopting the ‘Habbie’, ‘Christ's Kirk’ and ‘Cherrie and the Slae’ stanzas identified with earlier Scots-language poetry, and he can be seen generally, in providing such an ample and successful corpus of poetry in Scots, bucking the trend of linguistic Anglicization that proceeded through Scottish culture in the eighteenth century. He is a ‘reviver’ also in both writing and collecting several hundred Scots songs (folk songs very often, but including also what one might call ‘art songs’).

It is also the case that Burns is explicitly a patriotic Scot. In his letter of August 1787 to John Moore he records how reading ‘the story of Wallace poured a Scotish prejudice in my veins which will boil along there till the flood-gates of life shut in eternal rest’ (L i. 136). In November 1786 Burns was delighted to find a request for half a dozen copies of the Kilmarnock edition from Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop, a descendant of the great hero of the Scottish Wars of Independence. The much older lady from the minor gentry and Burns became great friends and correspondents, and in an early letter to her of 15 January 1787, Burns wrote of wishing to write something in honour of her ancestor: ‘My heart glowswith awish to be able to do justice to the merits of the Saviour of his Country, which, sooner or later, I shall at least attempt’ (L i. 85).