Tam O’Shanter

“The Rape of the Lock” by Alexander Pope (1712)

Burns, familiar with this iconic mock-epic from a generation earlier, uses its sense of faux-drama and tragic-comic action to recreate a similar feeling in which elevated diction and familiar formal techniques are used to skewer the behavior of characters decidedly un-heroic in their actions. In recreating a card game in which the young and comely Belinda is plotted against—in an effort to snip a locket of her hair by a callow suitor, identified only as the Baron—Pope mocks the pretentions of court life.

“Halloween” by Robert Burns (1786)

Written about the same time as “Tam O’Shanter,” this loving tribute to the Scottish fondness for All Hallows Eve celebrates the kind of apparitions that have become a hallmark of Scottish national literature. A long poem by Burns’ standards, the poem is cased in the same Gaelic Scot dialect as ‘Tam O’Shanter” and depicts with tongue-in-cheek hyperseriousness the reality of a succession of wraiths and ghosts.

The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving (1820)

Irving long acknowledged his literary debt to the folk tales of Europe and the United Kingdom in crafting his own tales of the dark, but few so clearly reflect that influence as this tale of the schoolteacher Ichabod Crane who collides with the Headless Horseman, a ghostly relic of the Hessian army who fought in the American Revolution.