Robert Burns

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in the village of Alloway in Ayrshire, in the southwest of Scotland. He was the eldest of seven children of William Burnes, a tenant farmer originally from Kincardineshire, and Agnes Broun, the daughter of an Ayrshire farming family. The clay cottage where he was born, built largely by his father's own hands, survives today as part of the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum ^[1].

The family's circumstances were hard. William Burnes worked a succession of poorly yielding farms, first at Mount Oliphant near Alloway and later at Lochlea in the parish of Tarbolton, and Robert spent his boyhood and youth in heavy manual labour that biographers have linked to the heart trouble of his final years ^[2]. Yet the household prized learning. William engaged a young teacher, John Murdoch, to instruct his sons, and Robert read widely: the Bible, English poets such as Alexander Pope, and collections of Scottish songs and tales. From his mother and from an elderly relative, Betty Davidson, he absorbed a store of ballads, folk beliefs, and supernatural stories that would later feed poems like Tam o' Shanter ^[1].

Burns began writing verse in his mid-teens. By his own account his first song was composed for a girl who worked beside him in the harvest field. When William Burnes died in 1784, exhausted and nearly bankrupt after a legal dispute with his landlord, Robert and his brother Gilbert took the tenancy of Mossgiel farm near Mauchline, and it was there, between the plough and the account book, that his major early poems took shape ^[2].

The years at Mossgiel, roughly 1784 to 1786, were the most productive of Burns's life as a poet. Farming went badly, but he wrote at speed: verse satires on local church politics, epistles to fellow rhymers, and pieces rooted in daily rural experience such as To a Mouse, prompted by turning up a mouse's nest with the plough in November 1785 ^[3]. His targets included the rigid Calvinism of the local kirk, mocked most sharply in Holy Willie's Prayer, a dramatic monologue that circulated in manuscript because it was too dangerous to print ^[2].

By 1786 his personal affairs were in crisis. Jean Armour of Mauchline was pregnant by him, her father rejected him as a son-in-law, and Burns seriously planned to emigrate to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper on a plantation. To raise money for the passage he arranged the publication of his poems by subscription. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was printed in Kilmarnock in July 1786 in an edition of 612 copies ^[1].

The Kilmarnock edition changed everything. It sold out within weeks and was praised well beyond Ayrshire, reaching readers in Edinburgh who were intrigued by a poet the critic Henry Mackenzie soon described as a heaven-taught ploughman ^[3]. Burns abandoned the Jamaica plan and rode to Edinburgh in November 1786, where he was taken up by the literary and aristocratic society of the Scottish capital. An expanded Edinburgh edition of his poems appeared in April 1787, earning him more money than he would ever again see from his writing, and its subscriber list ran into the thousands ^[2].

Any account of Robert Burns achievements has to begin with the poems of the Kilmarnock and Edinburgh editions. Works such as The Cotter's Saturday Night, To a Mouse, To a Louse, and Address to the Deil combined Scots vocabulary with English literary forms, and they treated farm labourers, animals, and village characters as subjects worthy of serious poetry ^[3]. His verse form of choice, the six-line stanza now often called the Burns stanza, became closely identified with him, though it had older roots in Scottish poetry ^[2].

His second great contribution was song. From 1787 until his death Burns worked, almost entirely without payment, for two collections: James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. He gathered traditional airs and fragments on his travels through the Borders and Highlands, mended broken verses, and wrote entirely new lyrics to old tunes. Around 370 songs in the Scots Musical Museum alone are credited to him in whole or part ^[4]. Auld Lang Syne, A Red, Red Rose, Ae Fond Kiss, and Scots Wha Hae all come from this labour, and Auld Lang Syne is now sung at New Year gatherings across the world ^[1].

His last decade also produced Tam o' Shanter, written in 1790 for Francis Grose's Antiquities of Scotland. The mock-heroic tale of a drunken farmer pursued by witches from Alloway's ruined kirk is widely regarded as his narrative masterpiece ^[3]. Late songs such as A Man's a Man for A' That, published in 1795, distilled his egalitarian convictions into lines that have been quoted at political occasions ever since, including the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, where the song was performed ^[5].

Burns's private life was complicated and much discussed, in his own time and since. He fathered at least twelve children by four women. His first child was born in 1785 to Elizabeth Paton, a servant at Lochlea. His long and interrupted relationship with Jean Armour, which began in Mauchline around 1784, survived her family's opposition and his Edinburgh celebrity; the two were formally recognised as married in 1788, and Jean bore him nine children, only three of whom outlived infancy into adulthood ^[2].

Other attachments left their mark on his work. Mary Campbell, the Highland Mary of later legend, died in 1786 and became the subject of several poems. In Edinburgh he conducted an intense, largely epistolary romance with Agnes McLehose, a married woman he addressed as Clarinda; their parting in 1791 produced the song Ae Fond Kiss ^[1]. Biographers have long debated how to weigh this record, and Victorian editors often softened or suppressed it, but modern scholarship treats his relationships as inseparable from the love songs that form so large a part of his output ^[4].

In person Burns impressed contemporaries as a brilliant talker with dark eyes that observers remembered, among them the young Walter Scott, who met him at an Edinburgh gathering in the winter of 1786 to 1787 and left a well-known description of the encounter ^[3]. He was a freemason from 1781, a keen letter writer, and a man of strong political sympathies who welcomed the early French Revolution, opinions he had to guard carefully once he held a government post ^[2].

Edinburgh fame did not translate into a livelihood. In 1788 Burns leased Ellisland farm on the River Nith north of Dumfries and, hedging his bets, trained for the Excise service, the government customs branch. He was commissioned as an exciseman in 1789 and rode long circuits inspecting traders while still trying to farm ^[1]. Ellisland's soil defeated him. He gave up the lease in 1791 and moved with Jean and the children into the town of Dumfries, working full time for the Excise on a salary of about fifty pounds a year ^[2].

The Dumfries years were outwardly modest but creatively rich. Freed from farming, he poured his energy into songs for Johnson and Thomson, refusing payment on the grounds that the work was a service to Scotland ^[4]. His radical sympathies brought trouble in late 1792, when he was reported to his Excise superiors for alleged disloyalty; he defended himself successfully but learned discretion, and in 1795 he joined the Dumfries Volunteers, a home defence corps raised against the threat of French invasion ^[2].

His health, strained since youth, collapsed in the winter of 1795 to 1796. The illness was almost certainly rheumatic heart disease, though the Victorian myth that drink killed him persisted for generations. A prescribed course of sea bathing in the Solway Firth in July 1796 likely hastened the end. Robert Burns died at his home in Dumfries on July 21, 1796, at the age of thirty seven, and was buried with military honours by the Volunteers on July 25, the same day Jean gave birth to their son Maxwell ^[1].

Few writers have been absorbed into a national culture as completely as Burns. Within five years of his death, friends in Ayrshire held a commemorative dinner, and the ritual grew into the Burns supper: an annual gathering on or near January 25 featuring haggis, whisky, recitation of his Address to a Haggis, and toasts in his memory. Burns Night is now marked from Scotland to Canada, Russia, and East Asia, and Burns clubs exist on every inhabited continent ^[1].

His literary influence ran deep in the nineteenth century and beyond. The Romantic poets read him closely, and writers as different as John Steinbeck and J. D. Salinger drew book titles from his lines: Of Mice and Men from To a Mouse, and The Catcher in the Rye from Comin thro' the Rye ^[3]. In Russia, Samuil Marshak's Soviet-era translations made Burns a widely read foreign poet, and his egalitarian songs earned him lasting popularity there ^[5]. In 2009 the Scottish public voted him the greatest Scot in a poll run by the broadcaster STV ^[5].

The physical record of his life is unusually well preserved. His birthplace cottage and the surrounding sites in Alloway are managed by the National Trust for Scotland as the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum, his Dumfries house is also open to visitors, and his remains lie in a domed mausoleum in St Michael's churchyard, Dumfries, to which they were moved in 1815 ^[1]. Statues of Burns stand in cities around the world, and scholarly work continues, including the multi-volume Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns begun at the University of Glasgow ^[4]. Among Robert Burns facts, perhaps the most telling is the simplest: more than two centuries after his death, millions of people who have never read a poem of his still sing his words every New Year's Eve.