167 Robert Burns and Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Sensitive hearts, Big Mouths Yann THoLoNIaT Université de Lorraine – Metz Robert Burns was a voracious reader: according to his grandson, his library contained, among other authors, “Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, Dryden, Pope, Goldsmith, Tasso, Voltaire, Molière, Boileau, Rousseau, and the Immortal Shakespeare” (Crawford 2009, 404). John Robotham adds Confucius, Euclid, Cervantes, and Goethe to the list (in McGuirk 1998, 281-297). Indeed, the poet who, for a long time, was considered as a “Heaven-taught ploughman” was as well aware of the tradition as of his contemporaries. He could also read French, and his brother Gilbert recalls his brother’s education with their preceptor Murdoch with admiration: “in a little while, … he [Burns] had acquired such a knowledge of the language, as to read any French author in prose. This was considered a prodigy” (McIntyre 20). This chapter sets out to show that one main influence over Burns’s worldview is Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s ideas. a musician, a lover of nature and a figurehead of the age of sensibility, an opponent of absolute monarchy, and as such an outspoken personality (what Michel Foucault would call a “parresiast” [2001, 2009]), prone to self-dramatizing, Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a philosopher in whom Burns found much to identify with and to draw upon so as to build his own poetic persona. Robert Burns certainly read some of Rousseau’s works, but no one seems able today to ascertain what specific books he knew. and what does reading mean? Pierre Bayard (2007) has warned his readers about the complexities of reading: what with books one has read but forgotten, books one has bought but has not read, or not read MEP_romanticism.indd 167 18/03/2015 08:52