Robert Burns performs a similarly ‘bardic’ function for Scotland as William Shakespeare does for England and, like Shakespeare, Burns is a writer whose part in the expression of a seemingly univocal ‘national identity’ sits somewhat at odds with his own trammelled cultural location. Where Shakespeare may have been a secret Catholic, spiritually at odds with a state establishment that increasingly adopted his imaginative vision of English history, Burns successfully marshalled contradictions in his own and in Scotland's identity. A Lowland poet of Presbyterian background, Burns inhabited the eighteenth-century tradition of poetry in Scots that, in its original Episcopalian, Catholic, aristocratic, Tory and Jacobite leanings, was largely hostile to his cradle culture. As with Shakespeare, arguably smuggling the Catholic purgatory into Hamlet, so too with Burns, who made his native Ayrshire oblivious to the fact that the ‘Habbie Simson’ stanza (later renamed the ‘Burns’ stanza in popular conception) and the ‘Christ's Kirk’ stanza, which he had imbibed from the Scots poetry revival of the east coast of Scotland, were not part of, and, indeed, traditionally sat ideologically at odds with, the dominant traditionally puritanical Presbyterian culture of Scotland. Burns, like Shakespeare, is a great cultural transformer, transplanting many ‘alien’ ideas into his ‘native’ soil.

As well as bringing to bear on Ayrshire the predilections of the Scots poetry revival of the eighteenth century (which included also, for instance, the depiction of enjoying food and drink as a means of cocking a snook at what it took to be the puritanical tendencies of Calvinist Presbyterianism in Scotland), Burns also played a large part in the Lowland acceptance of Highland culture. Though in jocular mode, William Dunbar, poet of the fifteenth century, had written that there was no music in hell except for the bagpipes, and this expressed an essential hostility towards the Highlands in Lowland Scottish culture more or less intact down to Burns's time. Burns's collection and recreation of Jacobite song and his extension of human sympathy to highlanders across his oeuvre helped begin to shift the racial hatred and fear of the highlander, which had reached its height in the alarm caused by the rebellion of 1745.