Burns Week (2)

Burns had a profound influence in Ulster and he was central to the Ulster, and particularly to the Ulster-Scots, literary tradition. The novelist Benedict Kiely, who was born in Tyrone in 1919, said:

Burns became a popular folk-author in Ulster, Catholic and Protestant, as he never was or could have been in any other part of Ireland. He still remained so in my boyhood: and I recall the local ragged rhymster saying to me, with a seriousness at which it was not possible to laugh, that: ‘Burns was the best of us.’

The poetry of Burns was especially popular in Ulster becuase of the Scottish influence in the province.  People were familiar with the Scottish words that he used and they had no need for the glossary at the back of his poetry books.