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This article examines the influence which Robert Burns had on Lord Byron’s poetry and his creation of the Byronic Hero, while also viewing T.S. Eliot’s 1937 essay on Byron as a significant piece of Byron criticism - useful not just for its insights on Byron, but for the affinities it reveals between Byron and Burns, and in turn, what it reveals about some of Eliot’s own critical and poetic practices. Eliot ranked Byron as second only to Chaucer in terms of ‘readability’, and praised him for his gifts as a tale-teller and his art of digression. I argue that Burns’s poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ was an important source for the techniques of digression and self-conscious performance found in Don Juan, as well as for Byron’s conception of the Byronic Hero, where, again, ‘Tam O’Shanter’, and The Jolly Beggars, are particularly illuminating.

This article focuses on several unexplored relationships between the poetry of Robert Burns and Lord Byron. In the first part of the article, I discuss how Burns and Byron manipulated their chosen verse forms to perform an ironic account of their own productions, which are often critical not only of conventional tastes, but also of their role as poets. In the second part of this article, I turn to two satires: ‘A Dream’, a poem that featured in Burns’s debut volume, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), and Byron’s ‘The Vision of Judgment’ (1822). Here I explore the shared satiric sympathies of the poets, examining how Burns’s and Byron’s satires reflect a similarity in temperament and geniality, despite criticising political or poetic foes, namely King George III and Robert Southey.