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Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd

Far from the Madding Crowd (1874) is set in a rural area of southwestern England known as Wessex. Though the story Hardy tells offers a somewhat more idyllic view of the countryside than that explored in “To a Mouse,” it provides a useful counterpoint to the disillusioned farmer in Burns’s poem. 

William Wordsworth, Wordsworth’s Poetry

It’s valuable to read Burns in relation to Wordsworth’s poetry, and especially to Lyrical Ballads, which he published with Samuel Taylor Coleridge in 1798. The purpose of Lyrical Ballads was to rejuvenate the lyric form for a new age. In fact, Burns’s songs and poems had anticipated just such a rejuvenation more than a decade prior to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s landmark collection. It is for this reason that some critics refer to Burns as a “pre-Romantic,” a connection that makes further comparison valuable.

John Steinbeck, Of Mice and Men

Steinbeck titled his 1937 novella after the famous lines from the penultimate stanza of “To a Mouse”: “The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men / Gang aft agley” (lines 39–40). The story takes place during the Great Depression, and it follows two migrant farmworkers in their struggles. Though the novella’s ultimate tragedy has little to do with Burns’s poem, the novella does have numerous thematic resonances with it, including the accidental harm done to animals.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Burns’s poem can also be linked to another of Steinbeck’s great works: The Grapes of Wrath (1939). Like Of Mice and Men, this book is set during the Great Depression. It follows the Joad family as they are forced to abandon their dried-up farm in Oklahoma and strike out West in search of migrant farm work.

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