Burns Club Atlanta Burns Club of Atlanta is fifty-third in seniority among several hundred organizations recognized by the Scottish-based World Burns Federation. Officially organized on January 25, 1896, the centennial year of Robert Burns’ birth, the Burns Club of Atlanta is quite possibly the city’s oldest surviving cultural and literary society. As early as the 1870s, Burns admirers in Atlanta had been meeting in private homes and hotels to celebrate the birthday of the Scottish poet. Shortly after the club’s formation, plans were made to construct for a clubhouse an exact replica of Robert Burns' birthplace in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. Situated in the
Poetry of Scotland Scottishness. The main legacy of Burns were the conservative and anti-radical Burns clubs that sprang up around Scotland, filled with members that praised a sanitised version of Burns and poets who fixated on the "Burns stanza" as a form. William Tennant's (1784–1848) "Anster Fair" (1812) produced a more respectable version of folk revels. Standard critical narratives have seen the descent of Scottish poetry into infantalism as exemplified by the highly popular Whistle Binkie anthologies, which appeared 1830–90 and which notoriously included in one volume "Wee Willie Winkie" by William Miler (1810–72). This tendency has been seen as leading late nineteenth-century