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Development as a poet

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Robert Burns

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• All Poetry - Biography of Robert Burns
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• Table Of Contents

Who was Robert Burns?

Robert Burns is considered the national poet of Scotland. Born in 1759 in Alloway, he wrote lyrics and songs in Scots and in English .

What was Robert Burns’s first book of poetry?

In July 1786 Robert Burns published his first major volume of verse, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect .

What is Robert Burns most famous for?

One of Robert Burns’s best-known poems is the mock-heroic “Tam o' Shanter,” published in 1791. He is also well known for his contribution to over three hundred songs that celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy, such as “ Auld Lang Syne .”

Why was Robert Burns called the “Ploughman Poet”?

Robert Burns was born into a farming family and raised on a smallholding. This upbringing earned him the name “Ploughman Poet” once he began to be recognized for his poetry.

Who did Robert Burns influence with his writings?

Robert Burns, as a pre-Romantic poet, had a significant influence on the later Romantic poets, such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge .

Robert Burns (born January 25, 1759, Alloway , Ayrshire, Scotland—died July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire) was the national poet of Scotland , who wrote lyrics and songs in Scots and in English . He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality .

Burns’s father had come to Ayrshire from Kincardineshire in an endeavour to improve his fortunes, but, though he worked immensely hard first on the farm of Mount Oliphant, which he leased in 1766, and then on that of Lochlea, which he took in 1777, ill luck dogged him, and he died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt. It was watching his father being thus beaten down that helped to make Robert both a rebel against the social order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms of religious and political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity. He received some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from other sources. He acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a bare smattering of Latin, and he read most of the important 18th-century English writers as well as Shakespeare , Milton , and Dryden . His knowledge of Scottish literature was confined in his childhood to orally transmitted folk songs and folk tales together with a modernization of the late 15th-century poem “Wallace.” His religion throughout his adult life seems to have been a humanitarian Deism .

Proud, restless, and full of a nameless ambition, the young Burns did his share of hard work on the farm. His father’s death made him tenant of the farm of Mossgiel to which the family moved and freed him to seek male and female companionship where he would. He took sides against the dominant extreme Calvinist wing of the church in Ayrshire and championed a local gentleman, Gavin Hamilton , who had got into trouble with the kirk session (a church court) for Sabbath breaking. He had an affair with a servant girl at the farm, Elizabeth Paton, who in 1785 bore his first child, and on the child’s birth he welcomed it with a lively poem.

Burns developed rapidly throughout 1784 and 1785 as an “occasional” poet who more and more turned to verse to express his emotions of love, friendship, or amusement or his ironical contemplation of the social scene. But these were not spontaneous effusions by an almost illiterate peasant. Burns was a conscious craftsman; his entries in the commonplace book that he had begun in 1783 reveal that from the beginning he was interested in the technical problems of versification.

Though he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends, Burns remained restless and dissatisfied. He won the reputation of being a dangerous rebel against orthodox religion, and, when in 1786 he fell in love with Jean Armour, her father refused to allow her to marry Burns even though a child was on the way and under Scots law mutual consent followed by consummation constituted a legal marriage. Jean was persuaded by her father to go back on her promise. Robert, hurt and enraged, took up with another woman, Mary Campbell, who died soon after. On September 3 Jean bore him twins out of wedlock.

Meanwhile, the farm was not prospering, and Burns, harassed by insoluble problems, thought of emigrating. But he first wanted to show his country what he could do. In the midst of his troubles he went ahead with his plans for publishing a volume of his poems at the nearby town of Kilmarnock . It was entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and appeared on July 31, 1786. Its success was immediate and overwhelming. Simple country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike hailed it, and the upshot was that Burns set out for Edinburgh on November 27, 1786, to be lionized, patronized , and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice.

The Kilmarnock volume was a remarkable mixture. It included a handful of first-rate Scots poems: “The Twa Dogs,” “Scotch Drink,” “The Holy Fair,” “An Address to the Deil,” “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Maillie,” “To a Mouse,” “To a Louse,” and some others, including a number of verse letters addressed to various friends. There were also a few Scots poems in which he was unable to sustain his inspiration or that are spoiled by a confused purpose. In addition, there were six gloomy and histrionic poems in English, four songs, of which only one, “It Was Upon a Lammas Night,” showed promise of his future greatness as a song writer, and what to contemporary reviewers seemed the stars of the volume, “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” and “To a Mountain Daisy.”

Burns selected his Kilmarnock poems with care: he was anxious to impress a genteel Edinburgh audience. In his preface he played up to contemporary sentimental views about the “natural man” and the “noble peasant,” exaggerated his lack of education, pretended to a lack of natural resources, and in general acted a part. The trouble was that he was only half acting. He was uncertain enough about the genteel tradition to accept much of it at its face value , and though, to his ultimate glory, he kept returning to what his own instincts told him was the true path for him to follow, far too many of his poems are marred by a naïve and sentimental moralizing.

Edinburgh unsettled Burns, and, after a number of amorous and other adventures there and several trips to other parts of Scotland, he settled in the summer of 1788 at a farm in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire . At Edinburgh, too, he arranged for a new and enlarged edition (1787) of his Poems, but little of significance was added to the Kilmarnock selection. He found farming at Ellisland difficult, though he was helped by Jean Armour, with whom he had been reconciled and whom he finally married in 1788.

In Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson, a keen collector of Scottish songs who was bringing out a series of volumes of songs with the music and who enlisted Burns’s help in finding, editing, improving, and rewriting items. Burns was enthusiastic and soon became virtual editor of Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum. Later he became involved with a similar project for George Thomson , but Thomson was a more consciously genteel person than Johnson, and Burns had to fight with him to prevent him from “refining” words and music and so ruining their character. Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and the first five volumes of Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818) contain the bulk of Burns’s songs. Burns spent the latter part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs to provide words for traditional Scottish airs. He regarded his work as service to Scotland and quixotically refused payment. The only poem he wrote after his Edinburgh visit that showed a hitherto unsuspected side of his poetic genius was “Tam o’ Shanter” (1791), a spirited narrative poem in brilliantly handled eight-syllable couplets based on a folk legend .

Meanwhile, Burns corresponded with and visited on terms of equality a great variety of literary and other people who were considerably “above” him socially. He was an admirable letter writer and a brilliant talker, and he could hold his own in any company. At the same time, he was still a struggling tenant farmer, and the attempt to keep himself going in two different social and intellectual capacities was wearing him down. After trying for a long time, he finally obtained a post in the excise service in 1789 and moved to Dumfries in 1791, where he lived until his death. His life at Dumfries was active. He wrote numerous “occasional” poems and did an immense amount of work for the two song collections, in addition to carrying out his duties as exciseman. The outbreak of the French Revolution excited him, and some indiscreet outbursts nearly lost him his job, but his reputation as a good exciseman and a politic but humiliating recantation saved him.

Robert Burns

(1759-1796)

Who Was Robert Burns?

Poet Robert Burns began life as a poor tenant farmer but was able to channel his intellectual energy into poetry and song to become one of the most famous characters of Scotland's cultural history. He is best known as a pioneer of the Romantic movement for his lyrical poetry and his rewriting of Scottish folk songs, many of which are still well known across the world today. Since his death on July 21, 1796, his work has inspired many Western thinkers.

Since he was a boy, Burns found farm work demanding and detrimental to this health. He broke up the drudgery by writing poetry and engaging with the opposite sex. When his father died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt, it only served to deepen Burns's critical view of the religious and political establishment that perpetuated Scotland's rigid class system.

The Life of a Lover and Writer

In the years 1784 to 1788, Burns engaged in simultaneous illicit relationships that produced several illegitimate children. In 1785, he fathered his first child, Elizabeth, born out of wedlock to his mother’s servant, Elizabeth Paton, while at the same time he was courting Jean Amour. When Jean became pregnant, her father forbade the two to get married, and Jean honored her father’s wishes, at least temporarily. Enraged at Jean's rejection, Burns began wooing Mary Campbell and considered running away with her to the Caribbean. However, Mary suddenly died, changing his plans.

Amidst the domestic chaos in Burns’s life, in July 1786, he published his first major volume of verse, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect . Critics praised the work, and its appeal spanned different classes of Scottish society. With this sudden success, Burns decided to stay in Scotland, and that November, he set out for Edinburgh to bask in the glory.

Achievement and Sudden Fame

While in Edinburgh, Burns made many close friends including Agnes “Nancy” McLehose, with whom he exchanged passionate letters, but was unable to consummate the relationship. Frustrated, he began to seduce her servant, Jenny Clow, who bore him a son. Turning to business, Burns befriended James Johnson, a fledgling music publisher, who asked him for help. The result was The Scots Musical Museum , a collection of traditional music of Scotland. Tired of the urban life, Burns settled on a farm at Ellisland in the summer of 1788 and finally married Jean Amour. The couple would ultimately have nine children, only three of whom survived infancy.

In 1791, however, Burns quit farming for good and moved his family to the nearby town of Dumfries. There he accepted the position of excise officer—essentially a tax collector—and continued to write and gather traditional Scottish songs. That year he published “Tam O’Shanter,” a slightly veiled autobiographical story of a ne’er-do-well farmer, which is now considered a masterpiece of narrative poetry. In 1793 he then contributed to publisher George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice . This work and The Scots Musical Museum make up the bulk of Burns’s poems and folk songs, including the well-known pieces “Auld Lang Syne,” “A Red, Red Rose” and “The Battle of Sherramuir.”

Later Years and Death

In his final three years, Burns sympathized with the French Revolution abroad and radical reform at home, neither of which was popular with many of his neighbors and friends. Never in good health, he had several bouts with illness, possibly attributed to a lifelong heart condition. On the morning of July 21, 1796, Burns died in Dumfries at age 37. The funeral took place on July 25, the same day his son Maxwell was born. A memorial edition of his poems was published to raise money for his wife and children.

Burns was a man of great intellect and considered a pioneer of the Romantic movement. Many of the early founders of socialism and liberalism found inspiration in his works. Considered the national poet of Scotland, he is celebrated there and around the world every year on "Burns Night,” January 25.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Robert Burns
• Birth Year: 1759
• Birth date: January 25, 1759
• Birth City: Alloway
• Birth Country: Scotland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Poet Robert Burns is considered one of the most famous characters of Scotland's cultural history. He is best known as a pioneer of the Romantic movement.
• Writing and Publishing
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• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Nacionalities
• Scot (Scotland)
• Death Year: 1796
• Death date: July 21, 1796
• Death City: Dumfries
• Death Country: Scotland

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• Article Title: Robert Burns Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/robert-burns
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• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 25, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography Hardcover – Illustrated, Dec 29 2008

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No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns's energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was "sprung . . . from raking of dung," and to his political enemies a "traitor." Drawing on a surprising number of untapped sources--from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries--this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and molded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the major Romantics. With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible elan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

• Print length 466 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Princeton Univ Pr
• Publication date Dec 29 2008
• Dimensions 16.51 x 3.18 x 23.5 cm
• ISBN-10 0691141711
• ISBN-13 978-0691141718
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Because Crawford is such an incandescent and engaging writer, his 400-page book, despite its 65-page chapters and sometimes page-long paragraphs, is something of a page-turner. Crawford's subject is owed credit for that, too. It's difficult to imagine a livelier, funnier, more passionate, more daring, more gifted life to study than that of Robert Burns. The perfect biographer has combined with the perfect subject here.

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"Burns was a poetic genius and his life was the stuff of legend. Compelling and timely, this book directs attention to a major poet who has been scandalously neglected in scholarship outside of Scotland for many years." --James Chandler, University of Chicago

"There have been scores if not hundreds of biographies of Burns. In an impressive feat, Crawford has written one that really justifies the claim of providing a new, original account--indeed, I would say it is as close to being definitive as we are likely to get." --Ian Duncan, University of California, Berkeley

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Princeton Univ Pr; Illustrated edition (Dec 29 2008)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 466 pages
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• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0691141718
• Item weight ‏ : ‎ 807 g
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 16.51 x 3.18 x 23.5 cm

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Robert Burns in Your Pocket: A Biography, and Selected Poems and Songs, of Scotland's National Poet Hardcover – Illustrated, 9 July 2009

• Print length 288 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Waverley Books Ltd
• Publication date 9 July 2009
• Dimensions 9.53 x 1.91 x 17.78 cm
• ISBN-10 1902407814
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Waverley Books Ltd; Reprinted 2018 edition (9 July 2009)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1902407814
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1902407814
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Poems & Poets

Robert Burns

Robert Burns was born in 1759, in Alloway, Scotland, to William and Agnes Brown Burnes. Like his father, Burns was a tenant farmer. However, toward the end of his life he became an excise collector in Dumfries, where he died in 1796; throughout his life he was also a practicing poet. His poetry recorded and celebrated aspects of farm life, regional experience, traditional culture, class culture and distinctions, and religious practice. He is considered the national poet of Scotland. Although he did not set out to achieve that designation, he clearly and repeatedly expressed his wish to be called a Scots bard, to extol his native land in poetry and song, as he does in “The Answer”:

Ev’n thena wish (I mind its power) A wish, that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast; That I for poor auld Scotland’s sake Some useful plan, or book could make, Or sing a sang at least.

And perhaps he had an intimation that his “wish” had some basis in reality when he described his Edinburgh reception in a letter of December 7, 1786 to his friend Gavin Hamilton: “I am in a fair way of becoming as eminent as Thomas a Kempis or John Bunyan ; and you may expect henceforth to see my birthday inserted among the wonderful events, in the Poor Robin’s and Aberdeen Almanacks. … and by all probability I shall soon be the tenth Worthy, and the eighth Wise Man, of the world.” That he is considered Scotland’s national poet today owes much to his position as the culmination of the Scottish literary tradition, a tradition stretching back to the court makars , to Robert Henryson and William Dunbar , to the 17th-century vernacular writers from James VI of Scotland to William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, to early 18th-century forerunners such as Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Burns is often seen as the end of that literary line both because his brilliance and achievement could not be equaled and, more particularly, because the Scots vernacular in which he wrote some of his celebrated works was—even as he used it—becoming less and less intelligible to the majority of readers, who were already well-versed with English culture and language. The shift toward English cultural and linguistic hegemony had begun in 1603 with the Union of the Crowns when James VI of Scotland became James I of Great Britain; it had continued in 1707 with the merging of the Scottish and English Parliaments in London; and it was virtually a fait accompli by Burns’s day save for pockets of regional culture and dialect. Thus, one might say that Burns remains the national poet of Scotland because Scottish literature ceased with him, thereafter yielding poetry in English or in Anglo-Scots or in imitations of Burns. Burns, however, has been viewed alternately as the beginning of another literary tradition: he is often called a pre-Romantic poet for his sensitivity to nature, his high valuation of feeling and emotion, his spontaneity, his fierce stance for freedom and against authority, his individualism, and his antiquarian interest in old songs and legends. The many backward glances of Romantic poets to Burns, as well as their critical comments and pilgrimages to the locales of Burns’s life and work, suggest the validity of connecting Burns with that pervasive European cultural movement of the late 18h and early 19th centuries which shared with him a concern for creating a better world and for cultural renovation. Nonetheless, the very qualities which seem to link Burns to the Romantics were logical responses to the 18th-century Scotland into which he was born. And his humble, agricultural background made him in some ways a spokesperson for every Scot, especially the poor and disenfranchised. He was aware of humanity’s unequal condition and wrote of it and of his hope for a better world of equality throughout his life in epistle, poem, and song—perhaps most eloquently in the recurring comparison of rich and poor in the song “For A’ That and A’ That,” which resoundingly affirms the humanity of the honest, hard-working, poor, man: “The Honest man, though e’er sae poor, / Is king o’ men for a’ that.” Burns is an important and complex literary personage for several reasons: his place in the Scottish literary tradition, his pre-Romantic proclivities, his position as a human being from the less-privileged classes imaging a better world. To these may be added his particular artistry, especially his ability to create encapsulating and synthesizing lines, phrases, and stanzas which continue to speak to and sum up the human condition. His recurring and poignant hymns to relationships are illustrative, as in the lines from the song beginning “Ae fond Kiss”:

Had we never lov’d sae kindly, Had we never lov’d sae blindly! Never met—or never parted, We had ne’er been broken-hearted.

The Scotland in which Burns lived was a country in transition, sometimes in contradiction, on several fronts. The political scene was in flux, the result of the 1603 and 1707 unions which had stripped Scotland of its autonomy and finally all but muzzled the Scottish voice, as decisions and directives issued from London rather than from Edinburgh. A sense of loss led to questions and sometimes to actions, as in the Jacobite rebellions early in the 18th century. Was there a national identity? Should aspects of Scottish uniqueness be collected and enshrined? Should Scotland move ahead, adopting English manners, language, and cultural forms? No single answer was given to any of these questions. But change was afoot: Scots moved closer to an English norm, particularly as it was used by those in the professions, religion, and elite circles; “think in English, feel in Scots” seems to have been a widespread practice, which limited the communicative role, as well as the intelligibility, of Scots. For a time, however, remnants of the Scots dialect met with approbation among certain circles. A loose-knit movement to preserve evidences of Scottish culture embraced products that had the stamp of Scotland upon them, lauding Burns as a poet from the soil; assembling, editing, and collecting Scottish ballads and songs; sometimes accepting James Macpherson’s Ossianic offerings; and lauding poetic Jacobitism. This movement was both nationalistic and antiquarian, recognizing Scottish identity through the past and thereby implicitly accepting contemporary assimilation. Perhaps the most extraordinary transition occurring between 1780 and 1830 was the economic shift from agriculture to industry that radically altered social arrangements and increased social inequities. While industrialization finished the job agricultural changes had set the transition in motion earlier in the 18th century. Agriculture in Scotland had typically followed a widespread European form known as runrig, wherein groups of farmers rented and worked a piece of land which was periodically re-sub-divided to insure diachronic if not synchronic equity. Livestock was removed to the hills for grazing during the growing season since there were no enclosures. A subsistence arrangement, this form of agriculture dictated settlement patterns and life possibilities and was linked inextricably to the ebb and flow and unpredictable vicissitudes of the seasons. The agricultural revolution of the 18th century introduced new crops, such as sown grasses and turnips, which made wintering over of animals profitable; advocated enclosing fields to keep livestock out; developed new equipment—in particular the iron plow—and improved soil preparation; and generally suggested economies of scale. Large landowners, seeing profit in making “improvements,” displaced runrig practices and their adherents, broadening the social and economic gap between landowner and former tenant; the latter frequently became a farm worker. Haves and have-nots became more clearly delineated; “improvements” depended on capital and access to descriptive literature. Many small tenant farmers foundered during the transition, including both Burnes and his father. Along with the gradual change in agriculture and shift to industry there was a concomitant shift from rural to urban spheres of influence. The move from Scots to greater reliance on English was accelerated by the availability of cheap print made possible by the Industrial Revolution. Print became the medium of choice, lessening the power of oral culture’s artistic forms and aesthetic structures; print, a visual medium, fostered linear structures and perceptual frameworks, replacing in part the circular patterns and preferences of the oral world. Two forces, however, served to keep change from being a genuine revolution and made it more nearly a transformation by fits and starts: the Presbyterian church and traditional culture. Presbyterianism was established as the Kirk of Scotland in 1668. Although fostering education, the printed word, and, implicitly, English for specific religious ends, and thus seeming to support change, religion was largely a force for constraint and uniformity. Religion was aided but simultaneously undermined by traditional culture, the inherited ways of living, perceiving, and creating. Traditional culture was conservative, preferring the old ways—agricultural subsistence or near subsistence patterns and oral forms of information and artistry conveyed in customs, songs, and stories. But if both religion and traditional culture worked to maintain the status quo, traditional culture was finally more flexible: as inherited, largely oral knowledge and art always adapting to fit the times, traditional culture was less rigid. It was diverse and it celebrated freedom. Scotland’s upheavals were in many ways Burns’s upheavals as well: he embraced cultural nationalism to celebrate Scotland in poem and song; he struggled as a tenant farmer without the requisite capital and know-how in the age of “improvement”; he combined the oral world of his childhood and region with the education his father arranged through an “adventure school”; he accepted, but resented, the moral judgments of the Kirk against himself and friends such as Gavin Hamilton; he knew the religious controversies which pitted moderate against conservative on matters of church control and belief; he reveled in traditional culture’s balladry, song, proverbs, and customs. He was a man of his time, and his success as poet, songwriter, and human being owes much to the way he responded to the world around him. Some have called him the typical Scot, Everyman. Burns began his career as a local poet writing for a local, known audience to whom he looked for immediate response, as do all artists in a traditional context. He wrote on topics of appeal both to himself and to his artistic constituency, often in a wonderfully appealing conversational style. Burns’s early life was spent in the southwest of Scotland, where his father worked as an estate gardener in Alloway, near Ayr. Subsequently William Burnes leased successively two farms in the region, Mount Oliphant nearby and Lochlie near Tarbolton. Between 1765 and 1768 Burns attended an “adventure” school established by his father and several neighbors with John Murdock as teacher, and in 1775 he attended a mathematics school in Kirkoswald. These formal and more or less institutionalized bouts of education were extended at home under the tutelage of his father. Burns was identified as odd because he always carried a book; a countrywoman in Dunscore, who had seen Burns riding slowly among the hills reading, once remarked, “That’s surely no a good man, for he has aye a book in his hand!” The woman no doubt assumed an oral norm, the medium of traditional culture. Life on a pre-or semi-improved farm was backbreaking and frequently heartbreaking, since bad weather might wipe out a year’s effort. Bad seed would not prosper even in the best-prepared soil. Rain and damp, though necessary for crop growth, were often “too much of a good thing.” Burns grew up knowing the vagaries of farming and understanding full well both mental preparation and long days of physical labor. His father had married late and was thus older than many men with a household of children; he was also less physically resilient and less able to endure the tenant farmer’s lot. Bad seed and rising rents at various times spelled failure to his ventures. At the time of his approaching death and a disastrous end to the Lochlie lease, Burns and his brother secretly leased Mossgiel Farm near Mauchline. Burns was 25. The death of his father, the family’s patriarchal force for constraint in religion, education, and morality, freed Burns. He quickly became recognized as a rhymer, sometimes signing himself after the farm as Rab Mossgiel. The midwife’s prophecy at his birth—that he would be much attracted to the lasses—became a reality; in 1785 he fathered a daughter by Betty Paton, and in 1786 had twins by Jean Armour. His fornications and his thoughts about the Kirk, made public, opened him to church censure, which he bore but little accepted. It was almost as though the floodgates had burst: his poetic output between 1784 and 1786 includes many of those works on which his reputation stands—epistles, satires, manners-painting, and songs—many of which he circulated in the manner of the times: in manuscript or by reading aloud. Many works of this period, judiciously chosen to appeal to a wider audience, appeared in the first formal publication of his work, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect , printed in Kilmarnock in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions. The Kilmarnock edition might be seen as the result of two years or so of riotous living: much conviviality, much socializing with women in an era before birth control, much thinking about humanity without the “correcting” restraint of the paterfamilias, much poetry and song ostensibly about the immediate environment but encapsulating aspects of the human condition. All of this was certainly more interesting than the agricultural round, which offered a physical constraint to match the moral and mental constraint of religion. Both forms of constraint impeded the delight in life that many of Burns’s finest works exhibit. Furthermore, he was in serious trouble with the Armour family, who destroyed a written and acceptable, if a bit unorthodox, marriage contract. He resolved to get out of town quickly and to leave behind something to prove his worth. He seems to have made plans to immigrate to the West Indies, and he brought to fruition his plan to publish some of his already well-received works. One of the 612 copies reached Edinburgh and was perceived to have merit. Informed of this casual endorsement, Burns abandoned his plans for immigration—if they had ever been serious—and left instead for Edinburgh. The Kilmarnock edition shows Burns’s penchant for self-presentation and his ability to choose variable poses to fit the expectations of the intended receiver. Burns presents himself as an untutored rhymer, who wrote to counteract life’s woes; he feigns anxiety over the reception of his poems; he pays tribute to the genius of the Scots poets Ramsay and Fergusson; and he requests the reader’s indulgence. In large measure, the material belies the tentativeness of the preface, revealing a poet aware of his literary tradition, capable of building on it, and deft in using a variety of voices—from “couthie” and colloquial, through sentimental and tender, to satiric and pointed. But the book also contains evidence of Burns as local poet, turning life to verse in slight, spur-of-the-moment pieces, occasional rhymes made on local personages, often to the gratification of their enemies. The Kilmarnock edition, however, is more revealing for its illustration of his place in a literary tradition: “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” for example, echoes Fergusson’s “The Farmer’s Ingle” (1773); “The Holy Fair” is part of a long tradition of peasant brawls, drawing on a verse form, the Chrystis Kirk stanza, known by the name of a representative poem attributed to James I: “Chrystis Kirk of the Grene.” Many of Burns’s poems and verse epistles employ the six-line stanza, derived from the medieval tail-rhyme stanza which was used in Scotland by Sir David Lindsay in Ane Satyre of the Thrie Estaitis (1602) but was probably seen by Burns in James Watson’s Choice Collection (1706-1711) in works by Hamilton of Gilbertfield and Robert Sempill of Beltrees; Sempill’s “The Life and Death of Habbie Simpson” gave the form its accepted name, Standard Habbie. Quotations from and allusions to English literary figures and their works appear throughout his work: Thomas Gray in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” Alexander Pope in “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” John Milton in “Address to the Deil.” Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (an undistinguished title used often before and after as a title of local poets’ effusions) was a success. With all its obvious contradictions—untutored but clearly lettered; peasant but perspicacious; conscious national pride (“The Vision,” “Scotch Drink”) together with multiple references to other literatures—the Kilmarnock edition set the stage for Burns’s success in Edinburgh and anticipated his conscious involvement in the cultural nationalistic movement. Such works as “Address to the Deil” anticipate this later concern:

O Thou, whatever title suit theee! Auld Hornie, Satan, Nick, or Clootie, Wha in you cavern grim an’ sooty Clos’d under hatches, Spairges about the brunstane cootie, To scaud poor wretches! Hear me, auld Hangie , for a wee, An’ let poor, damned bodies bee; I’m sure sma’ pleasure it can gie, Ev’n to a deil , To skelp an’ scaud poor dogs like me, An’ hear us squeel!

These two stanzas provide evidence of the implicit tension between established religion and traditional culture rampant in Burns’s early work. Burns takes his epigraph from Milton—

O Prince, O chief of many throned pow’rs , That led th’ embattl’d Seraphim to war—

conjuring up biblical ideas of Satan as fallen angel, hell as a place of fire and damnation, the devil as punisher of evil. But Burns’s deil , familiarly addressed, is an almost comic, ever-present figure, tempting humanity but escapable. Burns allies him with traditional forces—spunkies, waterkelpies—and gives old Clootie no more force or power. Traditional notions of the devil are much less restraining than the formal religious concepts. By juxtaposing Satan and Auld Nickie, Burns conjures up metaphorically the two dominant cultural forces—one for constraint and the other for freedom. Here as elsewhere in Burns’s work, freedom reigns. Burns’s affection for traditional culture is amply illustrated. In a well-known autobiographical letter to Dr. John Moore (August 2, 1787) he pays tribute to its early influence when he says, “In my infant and boyish days too, I owed much to an old Maid of my Mother’s, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity and superstition.—She had, I suppose, the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery.—This cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy.” Burns’s first and last works were songs, reflecting his deep connection with oral ballad and song. The world of custom and belief is most particularly described in “Halloween,” an ethnographic poem with footnotes elucidating rural customs. Many forms of prognostication are possible on this evening when this world and the other world or worlds hold converse, a time when unusual things are deemed possible—especially foretelling one’s future mate and status. Burns’s notes and prefatory material have often been used as evidence of his distance from and perhaps disdain for such practices. Yet the poem itself is peopled with a sympathetic cast of youths, chaperoned by an old woman, joined together for fun and fellowship. The youthful players try several prognosticatory rites in attempting to anticipate their future love relationships. In one stanza Burns alludes to a particular practice—“pou their stalks o’ corn ”—and explains in his note that “they go to the barn-yard, and pull each, at three several times, a stalk of Oats. If the third stalk wants the top-pickle , that is, the grain at the top of the stalk, the party in question will come to the marriage-bed any thing but a Maid.” Burns concludes the stanza by saying that one Nelly almost lost her top-pickle that very night. Some of the activities in what is essentially a preliminary courtship ritual are frightening, requiring collective daring. Burns describes the antics, anticipation, and anxieties of the participants as they enjoy the communal event, which is concluded with food and drink:

Wi’ merry sangs, an’ friendly cracks, I wat they did na weary; And unco tales, an’ funnie jokes, Their sports were cheap an’ cheary: Till buttr’d So’ns , wi’ fragrant lunt, Set a’ their gabs a steerin; Syne, wi’ a social glass o’ strunt, They parted aff careerin Fu’ blythe that night.

“The Cotter’s Saturday Night” is on one level a microcosmic description of the agricultural, social, and religious practices of the farm worker—albeit an idealized vision that reiterates Burns’s absolute affection for traditional aspects of life, a fictive version of his own experience. The poem is a celebration of the family and of the lives of simple folk, sanitized of hardship, crop failure, sickness, and death. Burns achieves this vision by focusing on a moment of domestic repose of a family reunited in love and affection. The Master and Mistress are the architects of the family circle; Jenny and “a neebor lad” seem destined to provide continuity. The gathering concludes with family worship: songs are sung and Scripture is read, including biblical accounts of human failings by way of warning. The domestic celebration of religion within the context of traditional life is noble and good.

From Scenes like these, old SCOTIA’S grandeur springs, That makes her lov’d at home, rever’d abroad: Princes and lords are but the breath of kings, ‘An honest man’s the noble work of GOD.’

This poem was lauded largely because of its linguistic accessibility, as a pastoral expression of nationalism, a symbolic representation of the “soul of Scotland.” Auguste Angellier offers critical affirmation: “Never has the existence of the poor been invested with so much dignity.” The lowly farm worker is depicted as the ideal Scot. The cotter’s good life was already an anachronism, so Burns’s depiction in this early poem is antiquarian, backward-looking, and imbued with cultural nationalism—perspectives which became intensified and focused in his later work. But by 1784-1785 his work was already engaged in dialogue with larger cultural issues. The linguistic attributes of the poem become part of this conversation as Burns modulates from Scots into Scots English to English, poetically reflecting the dichotomy of feeling and thinking. The stability of life as described in this poem is a wonderful accommodation of traditional culture and religion; celebration of belief in God follows naturally from sharing a way of life. But the religion that is here applauded is domestic and familial. Institutional religion Burns saw as something quite other. Institutional religion at its worst is excessively hierarchical, constraining, and above all unjust, damning some and saving others. As a child Burns was steeped in the doctrine of predestination and effectual calling, which asserts that some people are “elected” by God to be saved without any consideration of life and works; the unchosen are damned no matter what they do. Carried to an extreme, the doctrine would permit an individual who felt assured of election to do all manner of evil, a scenario developed in Burns’s “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Burns could not accept the orthodox position of the so-called Auld Lichts; he believed in the power of good works to determine salvation. His corner of Scotland was a bastion of conservative religious position and practice: the Kirk session served as a moral watchdog, summoning congregants who strayed from the “straight and narrow” and handing out censure and punishment. Thus religion was a cultural force with which to contend. Burns participated in the debate through poetry, circulating his material orally and in manuscript. Chief among his works in this vein is the satire “Holy Willie’s Prayer.” Prompted by the defeat of the Auld Licht censure of his friend Hamilton for failure to participate in public worship, the poem, shaped like a prayer, is put into the mouth of the Auld Licht adherent Holy Willie. It begins with an effective invocation which articulates Willie’s doctrinal stance on predestination in Standard Habbie:

O Thou that in the heavens does dwell! Wha, as it pleases best thysel, Sends ane to heaven an ten to h-ll, A’ for thy glory! And no for ony gude or ill They’ve done before thee.

The poem continues with Willie’s thanks for his own “elected” status and reaches its highest moments in Willie’s confession that “At times I’m fash’d wi’ fleshly lust.” Burns has Willie condemn himself by describing moments of fornication and justifying them as temptations visited on him by God. The concluding stanzas recount Willie’s opinion of Hamilton—“He drinks, and swears, and plays at cartes”—and his chagrin that Minister Auld was defeated. The poem ends with the requisite petition, calling for divine vengeance on those who disagree with him and asking blessings for himself and his like. Burns condemns both the doctrine and the practice of institutional religion. The tensions between religion and traditional culture are particularly obvious in “The Holy Fair.” Burns’s depiction of an open-air communion gathering, with multiple sermons and exhortations, includes an important subtext on the sociability of food, drink, chat, and perhaps love—attractions which will lead to behavior decried in sermons that very day. Again religious constraint and traditional license meet, with freedom clearly preferable:

How monie hearts this day converts, O’ Sinners and o’ Lasses! Their hearts o’ stane, gin night are gane As saft as ony flesh is. There’s some are fou o’ love divine ; There’s some are fou o’ brandy ; An’ monie jobs that day begin, May end in Houghmagandie Some ither day.

“The Jolly Beggars; or, Love and Liberty: A Cantata” goes even further toward affirming freedom through traditional culture. Probably written in 1785 but not published until after Burns’s death, this work combines poetry and song to describe a joyful gathering of society’s rejects: the maimed and physically deformed, prostitutes, and thieves. The work alternates life histories with narrative passages describing the convivial interaction of the social outcasts. Despite their low status, the accounts they give of their lives reveal an unrivaled ebullience and joy. The texts are wedded to traditional and popular tunes. The choice of tunes is not random but underlines the characteristics and experiences described in the words: thus the tinker describes his occupation to the woman he has seduced away from a fiddler to the tune “Clout the Caudron,” whose traditional text describes an itinerant fixer of pots and pans, that is, a seducer of women. The assembled company exhibits acceptance of their lots in life, an acceptance made possible because their positions are shared by all present and by the power of drink to soften hardships. Stripped of all the components of human decency, lacking religious or material riches, the beggars are jolly through drink and fellowship, rich in song and story—traditional pastimes. The cantata rushes to a riotous conclusion in which those assembled sing a rousing countercultural chorus that would certainly have received Holy Willie’s harshest censure:

A fig for those by LAW protected, LIBERTY’s a glorious feast! COURTS for Cowards were erected, CHURCHES built to please the Priest.

“The Jolly Beggars” implicitly speaks to the economic situation of the time: more and more people were made jobless and homeless in the rush for “improvement,” and the older pattern of taking care of the parish poor had broken down because of greater mobility and greater numbers of needy. Burns offers no solution, but he does illustrate the beggars’ humanity and, above all, their capacity for Life with a capital L—a mode of behavior that is convivial; unites people in story, song, and drink; and exudes delight and joy: traditional culture wins again. Burns worked out in poetry some of his responses to his own culture by showing opposing views of how life should be lived. Descriptions of his own experiences stimulated musings on constraint and freedom. Critical tradition says that John Richmond and Burns observed the beggars in Poosie Nansie’s “The Holy Fair” may be based on the Mauchline Annual Communion, which was held on the second Sunday of August in 1785; the gathering of the cotter’s family may not describe a specific event but certainly depicts a generalized and typical picture. Thus Burns’s own experiences became the base from which he responded to and considered larger cultural and human issues. The Kilmarnock edition changed Burns’s life: it sprang him away for a year and a half from the grind of agricultural routine, and it made him a public figure. Burns arrived in the capital city in the heyday of cultural nationalism, and his own person and works were hailed as evidences of a Scottish culture: the Scotsman as a peasant, close to the soil, possessing the “soul” of nature; the works as products of that peasant, in Scots, containing echoes of earlier written and oral Scottish literature. Burns went to Edinburgh to arrange for a new edition of his poems and was immediately taken up by the literati and proclaimed a remarkable Scot. He procured the support of the Caledonian Hunt as sponsors of the Edinburgh edition and set to work with the publisher William Creech to arrange a slightly altered and expanded edition. He was wined and dined by the taste-setters, almost without exception persons from a different class and background from his. He was the “hit” of the season, and he knew full well what was going on: he intensified aspects of his rural persona to conform to expectations. He represented the creativity of the peasant Scot and was for a season “Exhibit A” for a distinct Scottish heritage. Burns used this time for a variety of experiments, trying on several roles. He entered into what seems to have been a platonic dalliance with a woman of some social standing, Agnes McLehose, who was herself in an ambiguous social situation—her husband having been in Jamaica for some time. The relationship, whatever its true nature, stimulated a correspondence, in which Burns and Mrs. McLehose styled themselves Sylvander and Clarinda and wrote predictably elevated, formulaic, and seemingly insincere letters. Burns lacks conviction in this role; but he met more congenial persons: boon companions, males whom he joined in back-street howffs for lively talk, song, and bawdry. If the Caledonian Hunt represented the late-18th-century crème de la crème, the Crochallan Fencibles, one of the literary and convivial clubs of the day in which members took on assumed names and personae, represented the middle ranks of society where Burns felt more at home. In the egalitarian clubs and howffs Burns met more sympathetic individuals, among them James Johnson , an engraver in the initial stages of a project to print all the tunes of Scotland. That meeting shifted Burns’s focus to song, which became his principal creative form for the rest of his life. The Edinburgh period provided an interlude of potentiality and experimentation. Burns made several trips to the Borders and Highlands, often being received as a notable and renowned personage. Within a year and a half Burns moved from being a local poet to one with a national reputation and was well on his way to being the national poet, even though much of his writing during this period continued an earlier versifying strain of extemporaneous, occasional poetry. But the Edinburgh period set the ground-work for his subsequent creativity, stimulated his revealing correspondence, and provided him with a way of becoming an advocate for Scotland as anonymous bard. If Burns were received in Edinburgh as a typical Scot and a producer of genuine Scottish products, that cultural nationalism in turn channeled his love of his country—already expressed in several poems in the Kilmarnock edition—into his songs. Burns’s support for Johnson’s project is infectious; in a letter to a friend, James Candlish, he wrote in November 1787: “I am engaged in assisting an honest Scots Enthusiast, a friend of mine, who is an Engraver, and has taken it into his head to publish a collection of all our songs set to music, of which the words and music are done by Scotsmen.—This, you will easily guess, is an undertaking exactly to my taste.—I have collected, begg’d, borrow’d and stolen all the songs I could meet with.—Pompey’s Ghost, words and music, I beg from you immediately.” Here was a chance to do what he had been doing all his life—wedding text and tune—but for Scotland. Thus Burns became a conscious participant in the antiquarian and cultural movement to gather and preserve evidences of Scottish identity before they were obliterated in the cultural drift toward English language and culture. Burns’s clear preference for traditional culture, and particularly for the freedom it represented, shifted intensity and direction because of the Edinburgh experience. He narrowed his focus from all of traditional culture to one facet—song. Balladry and song were safe artifacts that could be captured on paper and sanitized for polite edification. This approach to traditional culture was distanced and conscious, while his earlier depiction of the larger whole of traditional culture had been immediate, intimate, and largely unconscious. Thus Edinburgh changed his artistic stance, making him more clearly aware of choices and directions as well as a conscious antiquarian. In all, Burns had a hand in some 330 songs for Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803), a six-volume work, and for George Thomson’s five-volume A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793-1818). As a nationalistic work, The Scots Musical Museum was designed to reflect Scottish popular taste; like similar publications, it included traditional songs—texts and tunes—as well as songs and tunes by specific authors and composers. Burns developed a coded system of letters for identifying contributors, suggesting to all but the cognoscenti that the songs were traditional. It is often difficult to separate Burns’s work from genuinely traditional texts; he may, for example, have edited and polished the old Scots ballad “Tam Lin,” which tells of a man restored from fairyland to his human lover. Many collected texts received a helping hand—fragments were filled out, refrains and phrases were amalgamated to make a whole—and original songs in the manner of tradition were created anew. Burns’s song output was enormous and uneven, and he knew it: “Here, once for all, let me apologies for many silly compositions of mine in this work. Many beautiful airs wanted words.” Yet many of the songs are succinct masterpieces on love, on the brotherhood of man, and on the dignity of the common man—subjects which link Burns with oral and popular tradition on the one hand and on the other with the societal changes that were intensifying distinctions between people. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Burns’s songs is their singability, the perspicacity with which words are joined to tune. “My Love she’s but a lassie yet” provides a superb example: a sprightly tune holds together four loosely connected stanzas about a woman, courtship, drink, and sexual dalliance to create a whole much greater than the sum of the parts. The Song begins:

My love she’s but a lassie yet, My love she’s but a lassie yet; We’ll let her stand a year or twa, She’ll no be half sae saucy yet.

It concludes, enigmatically:

We’re a’ dry wi’ drinking o’t, We’re a’ dry wi’ drinking o’t: The minister kisst the fidler’s wife, He could na preach for thinkin o’t.—

The songs are at their best when sung, but there may be delight in text alone, for brilliant stanzas appear most unexpectedly. The chorus of “Auld Lang Syne” encapsulates the pleasure of reunion, of shared memory:

For auld lang syne, my jo, For auld lang syne, We’ll tak a cup o’ kindness yet For auld lang syne.

The vignette of a couple aging together—“We clamb the hill the gither” in “John Anderson My Jo” suggests praise of continuity and shared lives. In a similar manner “ A Red, Red Rose “ depicts a love that is both fresh and lasting: “O my Luve’s like a red, red rose, / That’s newly sprung in June.” Burns’s comment in a letter to Mrs. Dunlop of Dunlop in 1790—“Old Scots Songs are, you know, a favorite study and pursuit of mine”—accurately describes his absorption with song after Edinburgh. He not only collected, edited, and wrote songs but studied them, perusing the extant collections, commenting on provenance, gathering explanatory material, and speculating on the distinct qualities of Scottish song: “There is a certain something in the old Scots songs, a wild happiness of thought and expression” and of Scottish music: “let our National Music preserve its native features.—They are, I own, frequently wild, & unreduceable to the more modern rules; but on that very eccentricity, perhaps, depends a great part of their effect.” This nationalism did not stop with song but pervaded all Burns’s work after Edinburgh. Certainly the most critically acclaimed product of this period is a work written for Francis Grose’s Antiquities of Scotland (1789-1791). Burns suggested Alloway Kirk as a subject for the work and wrote “Tam o’ Shanter” to assure its inclusion. “Tam o’ Shanter” is the culmination of Burns’s delight in traditional culture and his selective elevation of parts of that culture in his antiquarian and nationalistic pursuit of Scottish distinctness. The poem retells a legend about a man who comes upon a witches’ Sabbath and unwisely comments on it, alerting the participants to his presence and necessitating their revenge. Burns provides a frame for the legend, localizes it at Alloway Kirk, and peoples it with plausible characters—in particular, the feckless Tam, who takes every opportunity to imbibe with his buddies and avoid going home to wife and domestic responsibilities. Tam stops at a tavern for a drink and sociability and gets caught up in the flow of song, story, and laughter; the raging storm outside makes the conviviality inside the tavern doubly precious. But it is late and Tam must go home and “face the music,” having yet again gotten drunk, no doubt having used money intended for less selfish and more basic purposes. On his way home Tam experiences the events which are central to the legend; the initial convivial scene has provided the context in which such legends might be told. After passing spots enshrined in other legends, he comes upon the witches’ Sabbath revels at the ruins of Alloway Kirk, with the familiar and not quite malevolent devil, styled “auld Nick,” in dog form playing bagpipe accompaniment to the witches’ dance. Burns incorporates skeptical interpolations into the narrative—perhaps Tam is only drunk and “seeing things”—which replicate in poetic form aspects of an oral telling of legends. And the concluding occurrence of Tam’s escapade, the loss of his horse’s tail to the foremost witch’s grasp, demands a response from the reader in much the same way a legend told in conversation elicits an immediate response from the listener. Burns, then, has not only used a legend and provided a setting in which legends might be told but has replicated poetically aspects of a verbal recounting of a legend. And he has used a traditional form to celebrate Scotland’s cultural past. “Tam o’ Shanter” may be seen as Burns’s most mature and complex celebration of Scottish cultural artifacts. If there were a shift of emphasis and attitude toward traditional culture as a result of the Edinburgh experience, there was also continuity. Early and late Burns was a rhymer, a versifier, a local poet using traditional forms and themes in occasional and sometimes extemporaneous productions. These works are seldom noteworthy and are sometimes biting and satiric. He called them “little trifles” and frequently wrote them to “pay a debt.” These pieces were not thought of as equal to his more deliberate endeavors; they were play, increasingly expected of him as a poet. He probably would have disavowed many now attributed to him, particularly some of the mean-spirited epigrams. Several occasional pieces, however, deserve a closer look for their ability to raise the commonplace to altogether different heights. In 1786 Burns wrote “To a Haggis,” a paean to the Scottish pudding of seasoned heart, liver, and lungs of a sheep or calf mixed with suet, onions, and oatmeal and boiled in an animal’s stomach:

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face, Great Chieftan o’ the Puddin-race! Aboon them a’ ye tak your place, Painch, tripe, or thairm: Weel are ye wordy of a grace As lang’s my arm.

Varying accounts claim that the poem was created extempore, more or less as a blessing, for a meal of haggis. Burns’s praise has contributed to the elevation of the haggis to the status of national food and symbol of Scotland. Less well known and dealing with an even more pedestrian subject is “Address to the Tooth-Ache,” prefaced “Written by the Author at a time when he was grievously tormented by that Disorder.” The poem is a harangue, delightfully couched in Standard Habbie, beginning: “My curse on your envenom’d stang, / That shoots my tortur’d gums alang,” a sentiment shared by all who have ever suffered from such a malady. The many songs, the masterpiece “Tam o’ Shanter,” and the continuation and profusion of ephemeral occasional pieces of varying merit all stand as testimony to Burns’s artistry after Edinburgh, albeit an artistry dominated by a selective, focused celebration of Scottish culture in song and legend. This narrowing of focus and direction of creativity suited his changed situation. Burns left Edinburgh in 1788 for Ellisland Farm, near Dumfries, to take up farming again; on August 5 he legally wed Jean Armour, with whom he had seven more children. For the first time in his life he had to become respectable and dependable. Suddenly the carefree life of a bachelor about town ended (although he still sired a daughter in 1791 by a woman named Anne Park), and the trials of life, sanitized in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” became a reality. A year later he also began to work for the Excise; by the fall of 1791 he had completely left farming for excise work and had moved to Dumfries. “The De’il’s awa wi’ th’ Exciseman,” probably written for Burns’s fellow excise workers and shared with them at a dinner, is a felicitous union of text and tune, lively, rollicking, and affecting. The text plays on the negative view of tax collecting, delighting that the de’il—that couthie bad guy, not Milton’s Satan—has rid the country of the blight. The Ellisland/Dumfries phase must have been curiously disjointed for Burns. At first he found himself back where he had started—farming and with Jean Armour—as though nothing had changed. But much had changed: Burns was now widely recognized as a poet, as a personage of note, and things were expected of him because of that, such as willingness to share a meal, to stop and talk, or to exhibit his creativity publicly. But he was clearly in an ambiguous class position, working with his hands during the day and entertained for his mind during the evening. Perhaps the mental and physical tensions were just too much. He died on July 21, 1796, probably of endocarditis. He was 37. His was a hard life, perhaps made both better and worse by his fame. His art catapulted him out of the routine and uncertainty of the agricultural world and gave him more options than most people of his background, enabling him to be trained for the Excise. His renown gave him access to persons and places he might otherwise not have known. He seems to have felt thoroughly at home in all-male society, whether formal, as in the Tarbolton Bachelor’s Club and Crochallan Fencibles, or informal. The male sharing of bawdy song and story cut across class lines. Depicting women as objects, filled with sexual metaphors, bragging about sexual exploits, such bawdy material was a widespread and dynamic part of Scottish traditional culture. Because the sharing of the bawdy material was covert and largely oral, it is impossible to sort out definitively Burns’s role in such works as the posthumously published and attributed volume, The Merry Muses of Caledonia (1799). Burns’s formal education was unusual for an individual in his situation; it was more like the education of the son of a small laird. His references to Scots, English, and Continental writers provide evidence of his awareness of literary tradition; he was remarkably knowledgeable. Lines quoted from Thomas Gray’s “ Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard “ (1751) acknowledge the literary precursor of the “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” while Fergusson’s “Farmer’s Ingle” was the direct, though unstated, model. Fergusson provides a less sentimental, more realistic, secular account of one evening’s fireside activities. Fergusson and Ramsay were direct inspirations for Burns’s vernacular works. He inherited particular genres and verse forms from the oral and written traditions, for example, the Spenserian stanza and English Augustan tone of “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” or the comic elegy and vernacular informality drawn from such models in Standard Habbie as Sempill’s “The Life and Death of Habbie Simpson,” used in “The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie.” His concern for feeling and sentiment would seem to connect him with the 18th-century cult of sensibility. Living in a time of extraordinary transition clearly enriched Burns’s array of influences—oral and written, in Scots and English. These resources he molded and transmuted in extending the literary traditions he inherited. Both critics and ordinary people have responded to Burns. Early critical response often placed more emphasis on the man than on his poetry and focused first on his inauspicious origins, later grappling with his character. Burns was seen by some as an ideal, as a model Scot for his revolutionary political, social, and sexual stances. By other critics his revolutionary behavior was viewed negatively: his morality, especially with reference to women and drink, was criticized, and his attitude toward the Kirk and to forms of authority and his use of obscure language were questioned. Burns the man became central because he was at one and the same time typical and atypical—a struggling tenant farmer become tax collector and poet. If he could transcend his birth-right, achieving recognition in his lifetime and posthumous fame thereafter, so might any Scot. Thus Burns became a symbol of every person’s potentiality and even of Scotland’s future as an independent country. To many, Burns became a hero; almost immediately after his death a process of traditionalizing his life began. People told one another about their personal experiences with him; repeated tellings formed a loose-knit legendary cycle which emphasizes his way with women, his impromptu poetic abilities, and his innate humanity. Many apocryphal accounts found their way into early works of criticism. But the legendary tradition has had a particularly dynamic life in a “calendar custom” called the Burns Supper. Shortly after Burns’s death, groups of friends and acquaintances began to gather in his memory. In 1859, the centenary of his birth, memorial events were held all over Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora, and January 25 virtually became a national holiday. The memorial events have taken on a particular structure: there is a meal, one ingredient of which must be the haggis, addressed with Burns’s poem before serving. After the meal there are two speeches with fixed titles, but variable contents: “To the Immortal Memory” and “To the Lasses.” “The Immortal Memory” offers a serious recollection of Burns, usually with emphasis on him as man rather than as poet, and often incorporates legendary instances of his humanity: he is said, for example, to have warned a woman selling ale without a license that the tax collectors would be by late in the day, thereby giving her the opportunity to destroy the evidence. The toast “To the Lasses” is usually short and humorous, paying tribute to Burns’s way with women and to the many descriptive songs he wrote about them. Interspersed among these speeches and other toasts are performances of Burns’s songs and poems. Typically, the event concludes with the singing of “Auld Lang Syne” by the assembled company, arrayed in a circle and clasping hands. The legendary cycle about Burns and the calendar custom in his honor represent an incorporation of Burns into the developing body of oral tradition which inspired some of his own work. The Burns Suppers in particular, held by formal Burns clubs, social clubs, church groups, and gatherings throughout the world, keep Burns alive as symbol for Scotland. Yet this widespread cultural response to Burns is often denigrated by serious critics as “Burnomania.” Initially Burns’s songs were dismissed by the critics as trivial; the bawdry was discounted; poems on sensitive topics were sometimes ignored; vernacular pieces were deemed unintelligible; aspects of his character and life were censured. Subsequent critics have responded to Burns out of altered personal and cultural environments. Wordsworth’s admiration of Burns’s depiction of real life is clearly a selective identification of a quality pertinent to his own poetic ideology. The initial perspective on the songs has changed completely; Burns’s bawdry has been seriously analyzed and seen in the context of a long male tradition of scatological verse; his satires have been lauded for their identification of social inequities; his vernacular works have been praised as the very apogee of the Scottish literary tradition. Critical praise of Burns’s songs and vernacular poetry curiously confirms a long Scottish popular tradition of preference for these works: no Burns Supper is complete without the singing of Burns’s songs and recitation of such works as “To a Haggis” and “Tam o’ Shanter.” National concerns, then, are often implicit in the valuation of Burns: he remains the national poet of Scotland. Since Burns was Scottish, his artistic achievements seem outside the mainstream of 18th-century English literature. Nor does he fit neatly into the Romantic period. As a result, he is often left out of literary histories and anthologies of those periods, the linguistic qualities of his best work providing an additional barrier. But language need not be a stumbling block, as translations of his work attest. Burns’s roots among the people and his concern with social inequalities have made him particularly popular in Russia and China. While Burns and his literary products are firmly rooted in the societal environment from which he came, both continue to be powerful symbols of humanity’s condition; and his utopian cry remains as elusive and appropriate today as when he wrote it:

That Man to Man the warld o’er, Shall brothers be for a’ that.

Burns died in Dumfries, Scotland, in 1796.

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Article contents

Burns, robert.

• Robert Crawford
• https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/4093
• Published in print: 23 September 2004
• Published online: 23 September 2004
• This version: 19 May 2011
• Previous version

Robert Burns ( 1759–1796 )

by Alexander Nasmyth , 1787

Burns, Robert ( 1759–1796 ), poet , was born on 25 January 1759 in a two-room clay cottage built by his father (and now restored as Burns's Cottage) at Alloway, Ayrshire, the eldest of the four sons and three daughters of William Burnes (1721–1784) , gardener and tenant farmer, and his wife, Agnes Brown (1732–1820) , of Maybole, Ayrshire.

Ancestry and childhood

Burns's grandfather Robert Burnes ( c .1685– c .1760) had worked as gardener to the Earl Marischal at Inverugie Castle, Aberdeenshire. Burns believed that this Robert Burnes had suffered for his Jacobite sympathies at the time of the 1715 Jacobite rising; afterwards he became a struggling farmer in Kincardineshire, and his third son, William (born at Clochnahill farm, Dunnottar, Kincardineshire), headed south, working as a gardener first in Edinburgh and then in Ayrshire. In 1754 William engaged himself for two years to work as gardener for John Crawford of Doonside House, near Alloway, 2 miles south of Ayr. By 1756 he had feued from Dr Alexander Campbell of Ayr 7½ acres of land near Alloway with the intention of setting up a market garden. There he began to build his cottage while also working as head gardener for Provost William Fergusson of Doonholm, Alloway. In the summer of 1756 William Burnes met Agnes Brown at Maybole fair; they married on 15 December 1757. William Burnes was comparatively well educated for a Scottish peasant. He valued learning and sought to procure education for his sons and daughters; later he prepared a short catechism for the instruction of his children, and instigated attempts to care for the historic local church, Kirk Alloway. Agnes Brown could not write but had a good knowledge of ballads and songs, having come from an extended family in which such lore was valued.

Burns was born into a small, Scots-speaking, west-of-Scotland rural community in which vernacular culture was strong. Betty Davidson (widow of Agnes's cousin) lived with the Burnes family and, as the poet put it later, ' cultivated the latent seeds of Poesy ' in the wee boy Robert ( Letters , 1.135 ). Superstitious and unlettered, Betty entertained the children with what Burns recalled in his 1787 autobiographical letter to the London Scottish novelist Dr John Moore as ' the largest collection in the county of tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies, elf-candles, dead-lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantraips, giants, inchanted towers, dragons and other trumpery '. Such accounts preoccupied the young boy, who also heard from his mother frankly erotic traditional Scots songs and ballads. Although local vernacular culture was strong the community was linked to the wider world and to English-language culture through church, education, and other channels. William Burnes became a private subscriber to Ayr Library (founded in 1762). Moreover William and Agnes were friendly with, for instance, William Paterson , Latin master of Ayr's grammar school, and with that school's writing master, while William Dalrymple , the young Ayr minister who baptized Robert on 26 January 1759, went on to become moderator of the Church of Scotland . By the age of seven Robert had been taught some reading and writing, having been enrolled by his father in William Campbell's short-lived school at Alloway Mill in 1765; when Campbell left William Burnes obtained a tutor for his children and those of four other local families. This was John Murdoch (1747–1824) , an Ayr man, who worked with William Burnes to teach Robert to comprehend and to commit to memory passages of English. Robert was sometimes punished by Murdoch for pranks, but he and his younger brother Gilbert (1760–1827) were usually near the top of Murdoch's class in spelling and parsing. Murdoch recalled how he taught his young pupils ' to turn verse into its natural prose order; and sometimes to substitute synonimous expressions for poetical words ' ( Mackay , 34 ). Among the schoolbooks used were the Bible and Arthur Masson's A Collection of Prose and Verse, from the Best English Authors , in which Robert particularly enjoyed passages of Addison . He also read ‘in private’ for the first time, devouring accounts of Hannibal and of Sir William Wallace , whose narrative ' poured a Scottish prejudice in my veins ' ( Letters , 1.135–6 ).

Late in 1765 Burns's father, seeking a larger house, took out a lease on Provost Fergusson's farm at the more isolated, less easily cultivated Mount Oliphant, near Alloway, but William Burnes had to keep paying the lease of his Alloway land too, since he could find no taker for it. So began a series of financial struggles that were to affect the Burnes family. By 1768, when John Murdoch moved to Dumfries, William and Agnes Burnes were living at Mount Oliphant with five children and no school nearby. William worked on the farm by day and taught the children arithmetic by candlelight, talking to his sons as if they were fellow men. In 1768 John Murdoch visited and reduced the family to tears with his reading from Titus Andronicus . Robert's father borrowed and passed to his sons such improving volumes as William Derham's Astro-Theology (1714) and John Ray's Wisdom of God Manifest in the Works of Creation (1691). The young boy began to take a sometimes puzzled and sceptical interest in questions of Calvinist theology, much debated in the local area, where (as elsewhere in Scotland) the more extreme faction of Auld Licht presbyterians was in contention with the more moderate New Licht wing of the Church of Scotland ; he also devoured a collection of 'Letters by the most eminent writers' and was inspired to imitate their English-language eloquence ( Mackay , 43 ).

By his early teens Burns was familiar with the work of ploughing, though for a time his father also sent him and Gilbert ' week about during a summer quarter ' to the parish school of Dalrymple, near Maybole ( Mackay , 45 ). About this time Robert also encountered a version of Richardson's Pamela and some fiction by Smollett . By 1772 he had access to the Edinburgh Magazine and (thanks to a gift from Murdoch ) the works of Pope . In 1773 his father sent him to Ayr for some sporadic teaching from Murdoch , including lessons in French and an amount of Latin. He was also acquainted with the more vernacular chapbooks and broadsheets of printed ballads sold by rural hawkers. Like several other Scottish writers Burns was in important ways bicultural, brought up on traditional (largely oral) Scots-language songs and narratives, as well as on English-language book culture.

Early compositions

By 1774 Burns was beginning to compose songs. In his autobiographical letter to Dr Moore in 1787 he recalled that in his ' fifteenth autumn ' he ' first committed the sin of RHYME ' by making a song for a ' bewitching ' girl with whom he had been partnered at harvest time, and for whom he had conceived a reciprocated passion: ' 'twas her favourite reel to which I attempted giving an embodied vehicle in rhyme ' ( Letters , 1.137 ). Though Burns lacked any formal musical education the sense here of a traditional Scottish tune underlying the poet's words, which become an ' embodied vehicle ' for it, is important to much of his work, as is his linking of poetry with the ' bewitching ', the erotic, and a mercurial consciousness of ‘sin’. His earliest songs were not ' like printed ones, composed by men who had Greek and Latin ' but were suited to those ' living in the moors ' ( ibid., 137–8 ). This may have been so but Burns's first poems often appear exercises in the rhetoric of eighteenth-century book-verse:

Avaunt, away! the cruel sway, Tyrannic man's dominion.

R. Burns, Song, Composed in August By 1775 Burns was at school again, for a time studying ' Mensuration, Surveying, Dialling, &c. ' under Hugh Rodger (1726–1797) , the parish dominie in Kirkoswald, not far from the farm of Shanter, in Carrick, on the Firth of Clyde ( Letters , 1.140 ). There he had a passionate encounter with a local girl, thirteen-year-old Peggy Thomson , with whom he kept in touch for some years; he also larked, and debated Calvinist theology with local lads. In Kirkoswald he read Thomson and Shenstone , and developed his own, studied epistolary eloquence.

Dr Fergusson , William Burnes's landlord, died in 1776 and the struggling Burnes moved inland from Mount Oliphant to the windswept, boggy 130-acre farm of Lochlie, in the nearby parish of Tarbolton. There the young Burns romanced local girls and read the works of Allan Ramsay , alongside a collection of English songs, while he developed his own poetic gifts in the composition of songs to local girls and celebrations of the local terrain. As a young man he developed a great fondness for dancing and assumed a slightly dandified appearance. His teenage friend David Sillar recalled the young Burns attending kirk in Tarbolton regularly with his family, when he ' wore the only tied hair in the parish; and in the church, his plaid, which was of a particular colour, I think fillemot , he wrapped in a particular manner round his shoulders ' ( Mackay , 76 ). Reading theology and (by 1781) Tristram Shandy , confident with women, and maturing as a poet, Burns was sociable and popular in the local community. Working hard on his father's farm, he also found time to practise the fiddle. Though he never became adept at this instrument he learned to read music with some competence, and later attempted to play the German flute. As well as Scots songs addressed to various sweethearts the young Burns was turning verses of the psalms into quatrains, and several early English-language poems reflect a concern with the precariousness of existence ( 'To Ruin' , for instance, and 'A Prayer, under the Pressure of Violent Anguish' ). While such works may have the quality of exercises they represent a fear of despair that dogged Burns , counterpointing his normal joviality. So among his early works the dark and the jaunty are often hand in hand.

On 11 November 1780 in a top-floor room in John Richards's alehouse in the Sandgate, Tarbolton (a room also used for masonic meetings), Burns founded the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, perhaps the earliest Scottish rural debating society. This all-male fraternity, whose rules were drafted by Burns , swore its members to secrecy and demanded that each ' must be a professed lover of one or more of the female sex '. Swearing was forbidden, social drinking encouraged, and haughtiness prohibited, so that ' the proper person for this society is a cheerful, honest-hearted lad '. Topics debated by the club included suitable marriage partners and ' Whether is the savage man or the peasant of a civilized society in the most happy situation ' ( Mackay , 82–3 ). Such a topic is at one with the Scottish Enlightenment interest in the progress of ‘civil society’, and it is evident that the young Burns was developing an interest in such works as Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), with its ethic of sympathy as a social bond. By 1781 he was also praising Henry Mackenzie's novel of sympathetic sentimentality, The Man of Feeling (1771), which he carried so frequently on his person that his copy disintegrated and had to be replaced. In 1783 he described Mackenzie's novel as ' a book I prize next to the Bible ' ( Letters , 1.17 ).

Sometimes happy, but also sometimes hurt and rebuffed in his own affairs of the heart, Burns in 1781 decided to strike out in a new direction and become a flax-dresser in the Ayrshire town of Irvine; this venture failed, the shop in which he worked burned down, and Burns suffered a bout of depression in late 1781. At this time he also read with great appreciation the Scots and English poems of Robert Fergusson (1750–1774) , who had died in Edinburgh's madhouse. While in Irvine, Burns enjoyed a very close ' bosom-friendship ' with the sailor Captain Richard Brown (1753–1833) , with whom he walked in Eglinton Woods, where Brown suggested to the still unpublished poet that he send his poems to a magazine ( Letters , 1.142 ). Though Burns does not seem to have acted on this suggestion he sent Brown one of the very few personal presentation copies of the first, Kilmarnock, edition of his poems when that volume appeared in 1786.

During 1781 Burns had also become a freemason, having been ' entered an Apprentice ' in the combined Lodge St David, Tarbolton, on 4 July ( Mackay , 119 ). He became an active mason, rising to depute master of St James Lodge, Tarbolton, by 1784. During Burns's deputy mastership Professor Dugald Stewart of Catrine, who later championed the poet's work, was made an honorary member of the lodge. Through masonic contacts Burns also came to know Sir John Whitefoord (1734–1803) , the agricultural improver, whose own contacts were later of use to the aspiring poet. Burns returned to Lochlie in 1782 to find matters there deteriorating. Struggling with the farm's acidic soil, William Burnes was facing severe financial problems. By 1783 his property had been sequestrated, and he was being pursued through the courts for rent arrears. Bad summers in 1782 and 1783 added to William's troubles and, though he succeeded in winning his law case before Lord Braxfield , the disastrous harvest of 1783 saw him a broken man, fighting tuberculosis; he died on 13 February 1784, and his body was taken for burial at the ruined Kirk Alloway. Burns's admiration for his father was great and is reflected in 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' , with its portrait of noble paternal concern and undaunted domestic virtue.

In April 1783 Burns at Lochlie began to keep a commonplace book of ' Observations, Hints, Songs, Scraps of Poetry, etc. ', including his own shrewd critical appraisals of his verse. He was conscious of the curious interest that a ploughman's literary concerns might have for future readers. As well as reworking comic and erotic song and ballad materials he composed several poems relating to his father's death; a strange fusion of the comic and elegiac is evident in 'The Death and Dying Words of Poor Mailie, the Author's Only Pet Yowe: an Unco Mournfu' Tale' , which builds on earlier works such as 'The Last Dying Words of Bonnie Heck' (a greyhound) by Allan Ramsay's friend William Hamilton of Gilbertfield ( c .1665–1751). Appearing in his commonplace book along with several mock epitaphs, Burns's poem treats with a tenderly comic voice the anxieties of death and the agricultural grind; at once mock-elegy and genuine lament, this poem led to another, 'Poor Mailie's Elegy' (composed about 1785), which uses the six-line ‘Standard Habbie’ verse form inherited from the comic elegy 'The Life and Death of Habbie Simson, the Piper of Kilbarchan' by Robert Sempill of Beltrees ( c .1595– c .1665). Burns's verse artistry led him to give new life to several Scottish stanza forms, making them ' crucial to the national spirit of his poetry ' ( Crawford , 84 ). He made such great use of the Standard Habbie stanza form in such works as 'Holy Willie's Prayer' (1785), which mocks Calvinist hypocrisy, and in his verse letters that it acquired the name ‘Burns stanza’. Its flicking short lines towards the end of each stanza lend themselves to speedy nods and winks:

Maybe thou lets this fleshy thorn Buffet thy servant e'en and morn, Lest he o'er proud and high should turn, That he's sae gifted; If sae, thy hand maun e'en be borne Untill thou lift it.

R. Burns, Holy Willie's Prayer Burns comes to use this stanza form in the period in the mid-1780s when he clearly blossoms as a poet. The form, already over a century old, transmits metrically an impulse to fuse the solemn and the lightly risible, the dark and the boisterous, which Burns inherited, developed, and transmitted with mischievous grace. Many of his finest poems delight in juxtaposing or blending uneasily defended respectability with gleefully subversive energy. His commonplace book functioned as a literary laboratory in this regard, and by about 1785 most elements of his literary personality had been assembled, including a humorous and purposeful tendency to view himself as what Robert Fergusson had called a ‘Bardie’—at once an ambitious poet of his people in full flight and a snook-cocking belittler of the grandiose tendencies in himself and others.

Burns knew about bards from his enthusiastic reading of the poems of Ossian , but his own mundane struggles were far removed from the nobly misty realms of that bard. In 1784, following their father's death, Gilbert and Robert took a lease on another farm, at Mossgiel, in the neighbouring parish of Mauchline. Drainage there was poor, and for all the brothers' efforts they were beset with problems of bad seed, hard frosts, and late harvests. During that summer and autumn, troubled by ' a kind of slow fever ' and ' langor of my spirits ' ( Letters , 1.23 ), Burns seems to have suffered another bout of depressive or psychosomatic illness, though he was also enjoying the ' honours masonic ' and the ' big-belly'd bottle ' of the lodge ( R. Burns , No churchman am I ). On 22 May 1785 an uneducated servant woman in her early twenties, Elizabeth Paton , gave birth to Burns's daughter Elizabeth (1785–1817) —' Dear-bought Bess ' ( Mackay , 137 ). Burns had made no promise to wed his lover, who later married a farmworker and widower, John Andrew , in 1788, after the poet and ' handsome Betsey ' had apparently paid a fine and done penance for fornication before Tarbolton Kirk Session ( R. Burns , The Fornicator ). Burns's poem 'The Fornicator' details these events, but was not published in his lifetime.

Styling himself Rab Mossgiel , Burns wrote flirtatious as well as satirical verse at this time, when he was paying court to Jean Armour (1765–1834) , the literate daughter of a Mauchline stonemason, though he also dallied with other local girls. By summer 1785, recovered from his illness and fired up by the poetry of those whom he called in his first commonplace book ' the excellent Ramsay , and the still more excellent [Robert] Fergus[s]on ', Burns was committing himself to a concentrated and ambitious aesthetic of the local, eager to write poems that celebrated his native ground ( Mackay , 156 ). His sense of himself as a Scottish poet was developing, and Gilbert was encouraging him to go into print, though the shock of the death of his youngest brother, John (aged sixteen), on 1 November 1785 meant that his awareness of tribulation also remained heightened. To this period belong some of Burns's major verse epistles as well as 'Holy Willie's Prayer' , a spirited and sly dramatic monologue that satirizes the Calvinist doctrine of predestination and its hypocritical exponent William Fisher (1737–1809) , an elder in the parish of Mauchline who had been involved in a series of vigorously prosecuted kirk disputes with Burns's Mossgiel landlord and friend, the lawyer Gavin Hamilton (1751–1805) . In his prefatory headnote, setting out the argument of 'Holy Willie's Prayer' , Burns describes Holy Willie as ' justly famed for that polemical chattering which ends in tippling Orthodoxy, and for that Spiritualized Bawdry which refines to Liquorish Devotion '; the poem that follows is equally devastating. This work is one of a group of contemporary satires on local kirk politics and arguments featuring neighbouring ministers and worthies; these poems include 'The Holy Fair' , 'The Twa Herds, or, The Holy Tulzie' , and 'Death and Dr Hornbook' . 1785 was also the year of the composition of Burns's 'Address to the Deil' , in which the devil (hailed variously as ' auld Cloots ', ' Hornie ', and ' Nick ') is spoken to with confident wonder as well as familiar vernacular directness; as in 'Hallowe'en' this is one of the poems in which Burns clearly delights in his repertory of folklore and superstitious tales. A mischievously confident tone married to a sense of inexhaustible and undeflected purposefulness characterizes these poems, as it does such different works as 'The Twa Dogs: a Tale' (about social inequality), 'The Vision' (presenting Burns's local muse in Ossianic ‘duans’), and a superb series of verse epistles in Standard Habbie. These poetic letters were actually sent, and should be seen as reinforcing Burns's emphasis on vernacular communion and on the local as paramount. This poetic outpouring in 1785 shows a determined confidence, though poems of the same period such as 'To a Mouse' demonstrate a continuing sense of vulnerability and the need for social sympathy.

By early 1786, when Burns was composing such works as 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (that pious celebration of impoverished domestic virtue), it became evident that Jean Armour was going to have Burns's child. He was reluctant to marry her but seems to have given her some documentary assurance (now lost) that he would stick by her. Jean Armour's father reacted angrily, had resort to law, and had this ' unlucky paper ' mutilated, sending off his daughter to Paisley ( Letters , 1.30 ). While the kirk investigated the affair Burns was well advanced with arranging for the publication (by subscription) of his first volume of poems. With Jean in Paisley he made eyes at Margaret Campbell (‘another wife’, who appears to have died young and is remembered as the shadowy ‘Highland Mary’ ), though when Jean returned in early summer 1786 Burns protested that he adored her and had tried to forget her by running into ' all kinds of dissipation and riot, Mason-meetings, drinking matches, and other mischief ' ( ibid., 37, 39 ). Emotionally upset, he resolved to sail as an emigrant to Jamaica (' farewel dear old Scotland, and farewel dear, ungrateful Jean '), but was called to do public penance on the stool of repentance (' the creepy chair ') at Mauchline kirk on 25 June 1786, with further public rebukes on 23 July and on 3 August, when Burns , Jean Armour , and three other fornicators were ' absolved from scandal ' by the Auld Licht minister, the Revd William (‘Daddy’) Auld ( ibid., 39; Mackay , 191 ). On 22 July Burns had made over his share in Mossgiel and all his property to his brother Gilbert . Jean Armour's father took out a writ for damages against Burns , threatening him with imprisonment. Burns fled towards Kilmarnock, wrote letters to friends about his forthcoming volume of poems, and planned his emigration to Jamaica on 1 September. Backed by local Kilmarnock businessmen and published by John Wilson of Kilmarnock, Burns's Poems appeared at the end of July, and during August he collected money from subscribers to the book. His departure for Jamaica from Greenock was now rescheduled for the end of September. On 3 September he received news of the birth of his twins: a son, Robert , and a daughter, Jean . Paternal emotions and the possibility of a second edition of his book seem to have led him to abandon his Jamaica plans, though he arranged for a ticket that would have allowed him to emigrate in October.

Book publication and visits to Edinburgh

Burns's preface to the 240-page Kilmarnock Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect , published in 1786, presents the author as one who lacked ' all the advantages of learned art ' and who, being ' Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing Poet by rule ', instead ' sings the sentiments and manners, he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him, in his and their native language '. The book, published in an edition of just over 600 copies, contained forty-four poems, in Scots and in English, including such substantial recent works as 'Scotch Drink' , 'The Twa Dogs' , 'The Vision' , and 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' . Thanks not least to the large number of subscribers obtained by Gilbert Burns and the poet's friends, the edition sold out in a month, making Burns a profit of over £50 . John Wilson wished Burns to advance money for a second edition, but the poet was reluctant to hazard this. The book had won him intense local admiration among the common people and gentry. A local minister, the Revd George Lawrie of Loudoun, sent Burns's Poems to an Edinburgh literary friend, the blind poet the Revd Thomas Blacklock , who asked his friend Professor Dugald Stewart to read some of the poems aloud to him. Blacklock wrote enthusiastically to Lawrie , hoping that there would be a second edition of the poems, and his letter was passed on to Burns , who soon gave up his emigration plans. In autumn 1786 he visited the Lawries , lent George's son Archibald a two-volume edition of Ossian and some books of songs and Scottish poetry, and got on well with the family. By 23 October he was dining with Lord Daer (recently returned from France, where he had met leading revolutionaries) and Dugald Stewart at the latter's house near Mauchline. Stewart recalled Burns then and later as ' simple, manly, and independent ', noting that:

Nothing, perhaps, was more remarkable among his various attainments than the fluency, and precision, and originality of his language, when he spoke in company; more particularly as he aimed at purity in his turn of expression, and avoided, more successfully than most Scotchmen, the peculiarities of Scottish phraseology. Mackay, 243

Burns and his poetry also appealed to other local figures, including the widowed grandmother Frances Anna Wallace, Mrs Dunlop of Dunlop, who began to correspond with the poet. By November, encouraged by his new acquaintances, Burns was proposing to visit Edinburgh, with plans for a second edition of his poems to be published there. He was also exploring the possibility of earning his living as an excise officer, a plan that would later bear fruit.

Late in November 1786 Burns rode to Edinburgh, fêted along the way by lowland farmers who had read his verse. On arrival he shared lodgings in the house of a Mrs Carfrae ( ' a flesh-disciplining, godly Matron ' ) in a tenement, now demolished, at Baxter's Close, Lawnmarket ( Letters , 1.83 ). Using his network of masonic connections, as well as other supporters, Burns investigated the likelihood of a new edition of his Poems . Dugald Stewart had given a copy of the Kilmarnock edition to the novelist and Edinburgh man of letters Henry Mackenzie , who reviewed the book in his magazine, The Lounger , on 9 December 1786, calling attention to Burns as a ' Heaven-taught ploughman ' whose ' neglected merit ' Scotland should recognize. Other Edinburgh reviewers also praised Burns in November and December 1786, while the influential earl of Glencairn secured the agreement of the hundred or so gentlemen of the Caledonian Hunt that they would all subscribe to a second edition of Burns's Poems , which (with its dedication to the Caledonian Hunt ) was published by subscription on 17 April 1787 by the famous and tight-fisted Edinburgh bookseller William Creech , who eventually paid Burns £100 for the copyright. The typesetter was William Smellie , one of the founders of the Encyclopaedia Britannica ; he introduced Burns to the all-male club that he had founded, the Crochallan Fencibles, for which Burns collected bawdy songs and where he met several of his fellow masons. Published in an edition of about 3000 copies, the 408-page Edinburgh volume of his poems was an immediate success, with ploughman Burns cannily presenting what his preface called ' my wild, artless notes '. Among the new poems added to the volume were the vigorous, slyly modulated Scots poems 'Address to the Unco Guid' and 'Death and Dr Hornbook' , as well as the 'Address to Edinburgh' , in which Burns on his best behaviour delivers a paean to ' Edina! Scotia's darling seat! '

During winter 1786–7 Burns seems to have engaged in several dalliances (resulting in at least one child) but also met many of Edinburgh's distinguished literati, and was given star treatment. At the house of the philosopher and historian Professor Adam Ferguson (1723–1816) he met the scientists James Hutton and William Black , along with the playwright John Home and the sixteen-year-old Walter Scott . Scott recalled that Burns wept on seeing a print of a soldier lying dead in the snow beside his widow, with a child in her arms. According to Scott the twenty-eight-year-old Burns ( 5 feet 10 inches tall) ' was strong and robust: his manners rustic, not clownish '; he had ' a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity ' that made Scott think of:

a very sagacious country farmer of the old Scotch school— i.e. none of your modern agriculturists, who keep labourers for their drudgery, but the douce gudeman who held his own plough. There was a strong expression of sense and shrewdness in all his lineaments; the eye alone, I think, indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and glowed (I say literally glowed ) when he spoke with feeling or interest. Lockhart, 115–17

Scott recalled also that Burns , who talked of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson ' with too much humility as his models ', was at that time ' much caressed in Edinburgh, but (considering what literary emoluments have been since his day) the efforts made for his relief were extremely trifling '. For the young Scott , Burns's conversation:

expressed perfect self-confidence, without the slightest presumption. Among the men who were the most learned of their time and country, he expressed himself with perfect firmness, but without the least intrusive forwardness; and when he differed in opinion, he did not hesitate to express it firmly, yet at the same time with modesty … his dress corresponded with his manner. He was like a farmer dressed in his best to dine with the laird … his address to females was extremely deferential, and always with a turn either to the pathetic or humorous, which engaged their attention particularly. Mackay, 267

The Revd Hugh Blair , the elderly professor of rhetoric and belles-lettres at Edinburgh University, pronounced himself ' a great friend to Mr. Burns's Poems ' and made suggestions about what Burns should include and exclude from his second, Edinburgh, edition, judging that his rollicking cantata 'Love and Liberty' ( 'The Jolly Beggars' ) was ' too licentious ' and ' altogether unfit ' for publication ( Low , 82 ). This spirited work of 1785 is set in Poosie (that is, Pussy) Nancie's doss-house (then disreputable, now splendidly preserved) for the ' lowest orders ' in Mauchline, and it is hard to think of Hugh Blair warming to a text one of whose boozy singers proclaims:

A fig for those by LAW protected LIBERTY's a glorious feast! COURTS for Cowards were erected, CHURCHES built to please the Priest.

Burns excluded 'Love and Liberty' from the Edinburgh edition, and it was not published until 1799. While he respected Blair , Burns got on better with Blair's younger colleague and professorial successor, the Revd William Greenfield , who became moderator of the Church of Scotland but was later dismissed after a homosexual scandal. Promoted in Edinburgh society by such figures as the duchess of Gordon , Burns was also toasted at Edinburgh's St Andrew's masonic lodge as ' Caledonia's bard, brother Burns ' ( Letters , 1.83 ). In Edinburgh he made friends not only with noble patrons but also with people such as the printer Smellie and the borders law clerk Robert Ainslie (1766–1838) , who became a close companion and confidant.

Burns composed comparatively little verse during his six-month stay in Edinburgh, but one of his most revealing acts was to write to the bailies of the Canongate to complain that the remains of the poet Robert Fergusson , ' a man whose talents for ages to come will do honor to our Caledonian name ', lay buried in the Canongate churchyard ' unnoticed and unknown '; the bailies granted Burns permission to erect a headstone on Fergusson's grave ( ibid., 90 ). Though the clerkly Fergusson , educated at St Andrews University, came from a background rather different from that of Burns he was the Scottish poet to whom Burns felt closest. Early in 1787 Burns wrote three poems to Fergusson's memory, calling him:

my elder brother in Misfortune, By far my elder Brother in the muse.

Fergusson's vivid vernacularity, his poetically vigorous championing of Scots language and of Scottish culture, and his depressive decline all struck chords with Burns , who modelled several of his poems, including 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' , on Fergusson's originals. Burns recognized in Allan Ramsay and in Fergusson channels of vernacular skill and poetic vitality; his own verse launches out from such Scottish examples. Early in 1787 he wrote to his admirer Mrs Dunlop that ' The appelation of, a Scotch Bard, is by far my highest pride ', and that he hoped to visit patriotic sights, making ' leisurely pilgrimages through Caledonia ' ( Letters , 1.101 ). Several works of this period celebrate peculiarly Scottish subjects. Where Fergusson had dreamed of feeding haggis to Samuel Johnson , Burns celebrated that Scottish delicacy with humorously patriotic glee in his address 'To a Haggis' , apparently the first of his poems to be published in a newspaper; celebrating the ' honest, sonsie face ' of the ' Great Chieftain o' the Puddin-race ', it appeared in the Caledonian Mercury in December 1786.

Several portraits of Burns were painted during his first Edinburgh visit. The first, by the coach painter and sign writer Peter Taylor , is in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery. Alexander Nasmyth , commissioned by Creech to paint a portrait of Burns from which John Beugo made an engraving for the Edinburgh edition of the Poems , became a walking companion of the poet. In entries from his second commonplace book that date from this period Burns recorded with a certain self-mocking tone comments on some of the people whom he encountered, including Blair , Greenfield , and the Creech who was slow to pass on to the poet profits from the Edinburgh edition. Reviews of this, published on 17 April 1787, were generally laudatory, and on 5 July the first London edition was published by Cadell , followed later in the year by pirated editions in Belfast, Dublin, Philadelphia, and New York.

Acclaimed, and fired by poetic and patriotic ambition, Burns embarked on a series of tours in Scotland and northern England in 1787. First, with his friend Ainslie , he set off for the borders on 5 May, visiting Duns, then crossing the border at the Coldstream bridge before returning to Scotland and progressing to Kelso, Melrose, Innerleithen, Berwick, Alnwick, and sites famous from the border ballads and Scottish songs. At Carlisle on 1 June 1787 Burns wrote to his friend William Nicol , classics master at Edinburgh High School, his only surviving letter in Scots; he then proceeded to Dumfries, where he was awarded the freedom of the burgh, and to Dalswinton, where he met his admirer Patrick Miller , before returning to Mauchline (where he was warmly reunited with Jean Armour ) and Mossgiel. At this time Burns was reading Milton and admiring ' the desperate daring, and noble defiance of hardship, in that great Personage, Satan ' ( Letters , 1.123 ). Later in June he set off on a west Highland tour that took in Argyll and Loch Lomond; he returned, having resolved not to marry Jean Armour , though he resumed his affair with her. By August he and the Jacobite William Nicol were on another highland tour, setting off via the battlesite of Bannockburn associated with ' glorious Bruce ' and heading north to Glenlyon (where Burns was fascinated by a supposed druids' temple) and Dunkeld, where he met the ' honest highland figure ' of the great fiddler Niel Gow (1727–1807) , whose ' kind open-heartedness ' appealed to him ( Mackay , 334 ). The forthright Jacobite Nicol and Burns went on to Crieff, Glen Almond, and the supposed site of Ossian's grave; at Blair Castle, Burns was a guest of the duke of Atholl , before he and Nicol headed for Aviemore, Cawdor, Inverness, Loch Ness, and Culloden; en route Burns collected some highland ballads and wrote some short poems celebrating his time ' Among the heathy hills and ragged woods ' ( R. Burns , Written with a pencil, standing by the fall of Fyers, near Loch-Ness ). Returning south via Aberdeen, where he encountered some local writers and academics, Burns met some of his Kincardineshire relatives at Stonehaven in mid-September, then visited his cousin James in Montrose. Burns and Nicol sailed from the fishing village of Auchmithie to Arbroath, visited Scone Palace, near Perth, on 15 September, then headed to Edinburgh.

Burns's last tour of 1787 was to Stirlingshire, in October; there, though Jean Armour was again pregnant by him, he pursued Margaret Chalmers and visited local historical and patriotic sites. While they may have had a business angle (since he visited some of his subscribers), Burns's 1787 Scottish tours developed and confirmed his interest in lowland ballad and song culture, as well as Ossianically refracted highland lore; the tours suggest his wish to assemble a sense of different Scotlands that would nourish him in his role as ‘Caledonia's bard’, and they undergird his developing work as a collector and remaker of songs and folk poetry.

By October 1787 Burns was back in Edinburgh, renting a room in what is now part of Register House, overlooking St Andrew Square, in the New Town. Robert Ainslie , Alexander Nasmyth , John Beugo , and Burns's new friend the law student Alexander Cunningham (1763–1812) were near neighbours. At this time Burns seems to have suffered some depression (' bitter hours of blue-devilism ', as he called it, in Fergusson's phrase), which may be connected with the fact that his baby daughter, Jean , died on 20 October, though Burns , miles away in Edinburgh, refers to the child's death almost glancingly; as is often the case, it is hard to gauge accurately his innermost emotions, since his correspondence exhibits not infrequently notes of self-protective bravado ( see Letters , 1.166 ). He examined himself closely (as in his long autobiographical letter of summer 1787 written to the London Scottish novelist Dr John Moore in a ' miserable fog of Ennui '), yet he also liked to adopt protean poses in his highly readable correspondence ( ibid., 133 ). Sympathetic to the ' honest Scotch enthusiasm ' of the Edinburgh engraver James Johnson , who was collecting ' all our native Songs ' ( ibid., 163 ) for a large, six-volume anthology with music, Burns had contributed work that he had collected to Johnson's Scots Musical Museum , the first volume of which appeared in May 1787 and the last in 1803. Burns was for the rest of his life de facto editor of this publication, contributing well over 150 of his own songs and reworking others that he collected. Mixing his own voice with the inherited and contemporary voices of Scottish popular poetry and song, he achieved some of his finest, world-class work, by turns piercingly lyrical, challenging, and playfully companionable. These are songs such as the male-voiced 'O my luve's like a red, red rose' or the female-voiced 'John Anderson my jo' that sound warmly direct. Yet any autobiographical matter that they contain is subsumed into a nurturing traditional form, so that the poet appears at least as much a transmitter, editor, or bearer of tradition as a creator who imposes his own personality on the material. Repeatedly Burns intensified the emotional charge of the work that he collected and remade, but he did this through instinctive and calculated artistry rather than through direct revelation.

On 4 December 1787, at an Edinburgh tea party, Burns met Mrs Agnes Maclehose (1758–1841) , who had separated from her rakish husband. Writing as ‘Sylvander’ and ‘Clarinda’ , Burns and Mrs Maclehose began a remarkable, intense, and mannered epistolary affair, one made all the more heated by the fact that for some of the time Burns was housebound with a dislocated kneecap and suffered depressive episodes. While conducting this passionate correspondence he was also applying for a post as an excise officer, and was made anxious by news from Gilbert that the farm at Mossgiel was doing badly and that Jean Armour's parents had expelled their pregnant daughter from their house. In mid-February Burns returned to Ayrshire, saw Jean Armour , and made arrangements to move to another, run-down, farm at Ellisland, in Dunscore parish, on the River Nith, north of Dumfries, which he would lease from his literary admirer the inventor Patrick Miller of Dalswinton. Burns meanwhile was still corresponding amorously with Clarinda , and had got with child her maidservant Jenny Clow of Newburgh (1768–1792), whose son Robert Burns was born in November 1788. His dalliance with Clarinda did not stop Burns making love to the pregnant Jean Armour early in 1788 ( ' I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter, and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones '; Letters , 1.251 ). Shortly afterwards Jean gave birth to twins, who lived only a few days. Burns returned to Edinburgh in March, was inducted into the excise , and ended his affair with Clarinda .

Exciseman and farmer

In spring 1788 Burns was trained as an excise officer by James Findlay , the Tarbolton exciseman. He also began to refer to Jean Armour as his wife, having apparently married her privately in a civil ceremony at the office of his Mauchline lawyer friend Gavin Hamilton . In mid-June Burns moved into Ellisland; on 14 July 1788 his excise commission was issued; and in August, having admitted to ‘Daddy’ Auld the irregularity of their marriage, Burns and Jean Armour were rebuked by Mauchline Kirk Session , who ' took them solemnly bound to adhere to one another as Husband & Wife all the days of their life ' ( Mackay , 427 ). Burns ordered for Jean 15 yards of ' black lutestring silk ' ( Letters , 1.304 ).

After Edinburgh, Burns felt ' at the very elbow of Existence ' on the demanding, 170-acre farm of Ellisland, and complained that the locals had ' as much idea of a Rhinoceros as of a Poet ', though he continued to collect songs and made friends with some of his country gentlemen neighbours, such as the amateur musician Robert Riddell of Glenriddell, for whom he prepared a two-volume collection of his unpublished poems and letters (now the Glenriddell Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland) and whose interleaved copy of The Scots Musical Museum (now in the Burns birthplace museum, Alloway) Burns annotated ( Letters , 1.311–12 ). By the end of 1788 Jean Armour had joined Burns at Ellisland, though work on their farmhouse there (paid for by Patrick Miller ) was not completed until the following year. Burns at Ellisland was to switch from arable to dairy farming, taking some interest in milk yields. William Clark , one of his hired ploughmen, recalled him in 1789 wearing at home ' a broad blue bonnet, a blue or drab long-tailed coat, corduroy breeches, dark-blue stockings and cootikens, and in cold weather a black-and-white-checked plaid wrapped round his shoulders ' ( Mackay , 442 ). On 18 August 1789 Jean gave birth to Burns's son Francis Wallace , and on 1 September Burns began work as exciseman for the Dumfries first itinerary, at a salary of £50 per annum. This work involved riding often 30 or 40 miles a day, four or five days a week, searching for contraband materials; attempting to combine this work with farming exhausted Burns , who suffered from headaches and depression that winter. However, in July 1790 he was promoted to the Dumfries third foot-walk division, at a salary of £70 per annum; there his duties demanded only a walk around the town of Dumfries. At The Globe inn he had an affair with the barmaid, Ann Park , who gave birth to his daughter Elizabeth on 31 March 1791, nine days before William Nicol Burns was born to Jean Armour . She went on to raise both children.

At Ellisland Burns wrote a good deal of poetry, including the erotic lyrics 'I love my Jean' and 'O, were I on Parnassus hill' . As a collector of songs and ballads he reworked many traditional lyrics, including 'My Heart's in the Highlands' and—perhaps his most widely known work— 'Auld Lang Syne' , a poem of healing sociability. Having found a ' kind funny friend ' in the English antiquary, relisher of slang, and bon viveur Captain Francis Grose ( bap . 1731, d . 1791) , ' a cheerful-looking grig of an old, fat fellow ' who was researching his Antiquities of Scotland , Burns in 1790 wrote for Grose 'Tam o' Shanter: a Tale' , which accompanies the account of Kirk Alloway in the second volume (1791) of Grose's work ( Letters , 2.52, 1.423 ). This substantial, carnivalesque, mock-heroic narrative poem begins with Tam (minus wife) and his male ' drouthy cronies ' in the pub, then sends its drunken protagonist on a storm-swept night ride to Kirk Alloway, where he sees ' Warlocks and witches in a dance '. Excited by a witch in a short shirt (' cutty sark '), Tam cries out and is chased by all the ' hellish legion ', but his ' grey mare, Meg ' rescues him, at the cost of losing her own tail to a pursuing witch; the poem ends with a po-faced mock-moral. Varying pace and diction, and characterized by power surges of excitement and reeling humour, this poem in Hudibrastic couplets is one of Burns's greatest achievements.

In the late summer of 1791 Burns extricated himself from the Ellisland lease, sold his crops in a roup, and then in November moved with his family to a tenement in the Wee Vennel (now 11 Bank Street), Dumfries. Almost immediately he needed to visit Edinburgh, where he had to deal with Jenny Clow , who was dying of tuberculosis, and where he and Agnes Maclehose exchanged locks of hair and the final, parting kiss; this appears to have given rise to Burns's slow and tender song beginning:

Ae fond kiss, and then we sever; Ae fareweel, and then for ever!

Though Burns and Agnes Maclehose exchanged further letters early in 1792, she sailed to Jamaica at the end of January in a failed attempt at rapprochement with her husband, after which she returned to Scotland.

Back in Dumfries Burns joined the Dumfries St Andrew's masonic lodge on 27 December 1791; as an exciseman he was involved early in 1792 in the capture of a smuggling schooner in the Solway Firth, and in April was appointed to the Dumfries first foot-walk. On 10 April 1792 he received his diploma as a member of the Royal Archers of Scotland , the monarch's ceremonial bodyguard. Nevertheless about this time, in poems such as 'Here's a health to them that's awa' , and 'Address to General Dumourier' , as well as in his correspondence, Burns displayed sympathies with political radicalism and with the republican cause in France, though Britain was soon at war with that country. When his employer, the board of excise , began to investigate his political loyalties he anxiously protested that ' To the British Constitution, on Revolution principles, next after my God, I am most devoutly attached! ' ( Letters , 2.169 ). Despite such protestations his politics, as articulated in verse, are more complex. As a poet he participated energetically in local election contests, but he was also very alert to larger issues. While in 1795–6 he wrote the seemingly loyal sentiment ' Does haughty Gaul invasion threat ' ( R. Burns , The Dumfries Volunteers ), in 1793 he had celebrated the overthrowing of ' Chains and Slavery ' in ' Robert Bruce's march to Bannockburn ', and earlier had cursed the loss of Scottish political independence: ' Such a parcel of rogues in a nation '. In 1795 he published in the Glasgow Magazine the song 'For a' that' , which celebrates universal brotherhood and concludes with a stanza that Marilyn Butler calls ' probably the closest rendering in English of the letter and spirit of the notorious Jacobin 'Ça ira' ' ( Crawford , 102 ). Its last two lines express the hope:

That Man to Man the warld o'er, Shall brothers be for a' that.

The scale of Burns's song-collecting activities is obvious from the publication of the fourth volume of The Scots Musical Museum , in August 1792; Burns composed or at least revised some sixty of the hundred songs in the book, while in the following month he agreed to contribute to the Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs being planned by the fussily genteel Edinburgh amateur musician George Thomson . Burns sought no pay for this work and intended that his contributions would contain ' at least a sprinkling of our native tongue ' ( Letters , 2.149 ). He contributed over a hundred songs to the Select Collection , which appeared in six volumes between 1793 and 1841 and for which settings were written by Haydn , Beethoven , Weber , and Hummel .

On 21 November 1792 Jean Armour gave birth to Elizabeth Riddell Burns (who died while still a toddler), and on 30 November Burns was elected senior warden of the Dumfries St Andrew's masons. In mid-December he travelled to Ayrshire to spend a few days with his friend and patron Mrs Dunlop , who worried that he was drinking too much. He was acquiring something of a reputation as a drinker, though this was probably exaggerated by his early biographers. Like his father he showed considerable care for his children's education, one Dumfries friend recalling him explaining English poetry to his nine-year-old son. February 1793 saw the publication of the second Edinburgh edition of his Poems (including twenty new pieces) and May the publication of the first set of Thomson's Select Collection . Also in May the Burns family moved to a larger house, 24 Mill Hole Brae (now Burns Street), Dumfries, the poet's last home and one that was occupied by Jean Armour until her death, in March 1834. In summer 1793, excited by his friend Thomas Fraser playing the air 'Hey Tutti Taitie' on the oboe, Burns , familiar with the tradition that this tune had been Robert Bruce's march at the battle of Bannockburn, warmed ' to a pitch of enthusiasm on the theme of Liberty & Independance ' and composed the lyric that begins:

SCOTS, wha hae wi' WALLACE bled, SCOTS, wham BRUCE has aften led …

R. Burns, Scots wha hae Burns confessed to Thomson that his thoughts of ' that glorious struggle for Freedom ' were also linked to other struggles ' not quite so ancient ' ( Letters , 2.235–6 ). Another account links the composition of this song to the poet's tour of Galloway with his friend John Syme in late July and early August 1793. That December a drunken Burns appears to have been one of a number of gentlemen who took part in a mock re-enactment of the rape of the Sabine women, during which Burns grabbed his admirer and friend the young poet and mother Maria Riddell . Though he was later stricken with awkward remorse the Riddell family broke off relations with him and ignored his efforts to atone. Burns attempted to exact revenge in several poems, and eventually achieved a measure of reconciliation with Maria , with whom he was again corresponding by December 1794.

Early in 1794 Burns again suffered ' low spirits & blue devils ', yet he managed to propose a somewhat self-interested reorganization of the Dumfries excise divisions (the plan was not adopted) and to send James Johnson forty-one songs that he had collected or composed ( Letters , 2.280 ). That summer he toured south-west Scotland and was at work on his 'Ode for General Washington's Birthday' , another celebration of a struggle for liberty. Drinking too much and feeling maudlin, he resumed his correspondence with Agnes Maclehose and addressed a number of poems to Jean Lorimer (‘Chloris’) . Jean Armour gave birth to Burns's son James Glencairn on 12 August. Though tempted by an offer of work on the Morning Chronicle , which would have paid him 1 guinea a week, Burns resolved to stay with the excise ; he seems to have been worried about deteriorating health and comforted by the thought that in the event of his death the excise would pay a pension to his dependants. In December 1794 he was promoted acting supervisor in the excise service.

Burns's last eighteen months were marked by illness, family bereavement, and a falling-out with one of his oldest admirers. In late 1794 he sometimes worked fourteen-hour days, visiting the excise's Sanquhar division. These long hours worked by Supervisor Burns continued into early 1795, a particularly harsh winter of intense blizzards and 30 foot snowdrifts. At the very start of 1795, aged thirty-six, he was complaining about ' stiffening joints of Old Age coming fast o'er my frame ' ( Letters , 2.333 ). That January Mrs Dunlop took offence at his description of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette as ' a perjured Blockhead & an unprincipled Prostitute ' and broke off relations with him, despite his pained attempts to revive their correspondence during the months before his death ( ibid., 334 ). From May 1795 onwards Burns suffered several bouts of illness. Continuing his long interest in local politics, he wrote in 1795 a series of poems in support of the successful whig candidate for the stewartry of Kirkcudbright by-election, Patrick Heron . Despite his radical sympathies, and his close friendship with his doctor, William Maxwell of Kirkconnell (1760–1834), a Jacobin who had been involved in founding the London Correspondence Society , Burns also played a considerable part in organizing the Dumfries Volunteers . This uniformed band protested their loyalty to the crown and exercised locally with their weapons in the Dock Park, Dumfries. In November 1795 Burns helped to draft the volunteers' address to the king celebrating the ' lasting fabric of British Liberty ' ( Mackay , 595 ). Prolonged ill health (perhaps rheumatic fever) in 1795 resulted in Burns's 'Address to the Toothache' ( ' My curse on your envenom'd stang ' ); then, when he was recovering from illness, in September his daughter Elizabeth Riddell died during a visit to Mauchline. After her death Burns , unable to travel to her funeral, suffered a severe depressive illness, which seems to have continued throughout the winter, though some visitors noted his animation in conversation, ability to hold his drink, and apparent health.

By February 1796, however, when there was unrest in Dumfries, Burns was back at work for the excise and collecting songs for Thomson , but that same month saw further rheumatic attacks, which made him unfit for work. Burns may have rallied in the early spring (he attended a masons' meeting on 14 April) but was soon complaining in a letter to his musical friend George Thomson of ' the heavy hand of SICKNESS; & [I] have counted Time by the repercussions of PAIN! Rheumatism, Cold & Fever ' ( Letters , 2.378 ). Gravely ill, he presented a set of The Scots Musical Museum to his seventeen-year-old nurse, Jessie Lewars , having written verses for her in the flyleaf. Worried about money and complaining that sickness reduced an exciseman's salary from £50 to £35 , he called in loans that he had made; he reacted with fearful gratitude to an offer of financial aid from his cousin James Burness of Montrose. He complained of ' excruciating rheumatism ' and followed the advice of ' Medical folks ' (among them Dr Maxwell ) that his ' last & only chance is bathing & country quarters & riding ' ( ibid., 385 ). Under advice the ailing Burns practised regular sea-bathing in the cold spring tides of the Solway at Brow, in the parish of Ruthwell. When the spring tides abated the rheumatic Burns returned to Dumfries, feeling no better. For Jessie Lewars he wrote his last song, 'Oh wert thou in the cauld blast' , and on 18 July returned from Brow to Dumfries; on the same day he wrote to his father-in-law, begging help for Jean Armour , who, about to be left with his five children, was in the last stages of pregnancy. Burns died at home, in Dumfries, on 21 July 1796, most probably of rheumatic heart disease complicated by bacterial endocarditis. On 25 July the Dumfries Volunteers fired over Burns's coffin at his burial, under a plain slab in St Michael's churchyard, Dumfries; on that same day his son Maxwell was born, but lived for only thirty-three months.

Posthumous reputation

After Burns's death there were published several volumes of work that had circulated only in private during his lifetime. These included The Jolly Beggars (1799), The merry muses of Caledonia: a collection of favourite Scots songs, ancient and modern, selected for use of the Crochallan fencibles ( c .1800; a collection of bawdy verses), and Letters Addressed to Clarinda (1802). James Currie's Works of Robert Burns, with an Account of his Life (1800) and Robert H. Cromek's Reliques of Robert Burns (1808) assembled more poems and documents, Currie censuring Burns for drunkenness. Burns's attitudes to drink, poetry, politics, and women have been argued over in a succession of biographies, distinguished among which are those by his friend Allan Cunningham (1834); by Robert Chambers (1851), Catherine Carswell (1930), and Franklyn Snyder (1932); and by David Daiches (1952), James Mackay (1992), and Ian McIntyre (1995).

Within a few years of the poet's death a number of clubs had been formed to honour his memory. The first was Greenock Burns Club (1801), which was soon followed by Paisley Burns Club (1805) and, as the century wore on, by literally hundreds of other Burns clubs in Scotland, Britain, and overseas. Accepted since his death as Scotland's national bard, Burns was the first poet of the English-speaking world to be honoured by a network of clubs dedicated to celebrating his life and works. The clubs were originally all-male and can be seen as drawing on masonic traditions as well as on the legacy of such associations as the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, the Crochallan Fencibles, and other clubs to which the poet belonged. An international network of Burns clubs is now co-ordinated by the Burns Federation , which publishes the Burns Chronicle and encourages the holding of Burns suppers around the world on 25 January each year. Sites associated with the poet in south-west Scotland are known collectively as ' the Burns country ', and the Burns Mausoleum, in St Michael's churchyard, Dumfries, erected in 1815 to provide a grander memorial to the poet (whose remains were moved to a vault below it in 1815), is one of several destinations for tourists and literary pilgrims to the Burns country. Among the earliest of these were several of the Romantic poets, including Wordsworth , Coleridge , and Keats , for whom Burns was an important exemplar. Burns was read enthusiastically throughout the British empire, and in America, where he mattered to poets as different as Whitman and Whittier .

Though the reputation of some poems, such as 'The Cotter's Saturday Night' (much admired in the nineteenth century), has declined, Burns has remained widely admired. In his essay 'The study of poetry' (1880) Matthew Arnold complained that Burns lacked ' high seriousness ' and ' a beautiful world ', but T. S. Eliot , in The Use of Poetry , thought Arnold's attitude to Burns ' patronising ' ( p. 106 ). In the twentieth century Burns has interested Robert Frost , D. H. Lawrence , Hugh MacDiarmid , Seamus Heaney , and Les Murray , among other poets. The modern scholarly edition of the verse is James Kinsley's three-volume Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (1968), while the letters were edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson (second edition by G. Ross Roy , 2 vols., 1985). A full, musicologically researched edition of The Songs of Robert Burns was edited by Donald A. Low in 1993. Burns has remained a genuinely popular poet, though not always one widely taught in universities. His work has been translated into most major and many minor languages, and his songs, still sung in Scotland and abroad, are available in a variety of recordings.

• J. Mackay, Burns : a biography of Robert Burns (1992)

The letters of Robert Burns , ed. J. de Lancey Ferguson, 2nd edn, ed. G. Ross Roy, 2 vols. (1985) Find it in your library Google Preview WorldCat

• The poems and songs of Robert Burns , ed. J. Kinsley, 3 vols. (1968)
• R. Crawford, ed., Robert Burns and cultural authority (1997)
• R. Burns, Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect (1786)
• D. A. Low, ed., Robert Burns : the critical heritage (1974)
• Memoirs of Sir Walter Scott , ed. J. G. Lockhart, 5 vols. (1900), vol. 1
• M. Arnold, Complete prose works , ed. R. H. Super, 11 vols. (1973), vol. 9
• T. S. Eliot, The use of poetry and the use of criticism (1933)
• R. Burns, The merry muses of Caledonia , ed. J. Burke and S. G. Smith, 2nd edn (1982)
• R. Brown, Paisley Burns clubs (1893)
• BL , letters and songs, Add. MS 22307, Egerton MS 1656
• Burns Cottage Museum, Alloway, Ayrshire, corresp. and literary MSS, letters and verses
• Hunt. L. , letters; literary MSS
• Mitchell L., Glas. , poems, letters, and papers
• NL Scot. , corresp. and papers
• NL Scot. , corresp., verses, etc., family papers
• U. Edin. L. , letters and MS poems
• U. Nott. L. , transcripts; notes for edition of collected poems
• University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, archives, MSS
• Writers' Museum, Edinburgh, letters, MSS, etc.
• Alloway, Ayrshire, Burns Cottage collection
• BL , Hastie MSS
• BL , autobiography in letter to John Moore, Egerton MS 1660
• Burns Monument, Kilmarnock, Ayrshire, holograph MSS
• Morgan L. , corresp. with Frances Dunlop
• Morgan L. , letters to Peter Hill
• Morgan L. , letters to George Thomson
• NL Scot. , Cowie collection, corresp. and poems
• NL Scot. , Glenriddell MSS
• NL Scot. , Watson MS
• A. Nasmyth, pencil drawing, 1786, Scot. NPG
• P. Taylor, oil on panel, 1786, Scot. NPG
• by or after J. Miers, ink silhouette, 1787, Scot. NPG
• A. Nasmyth, oils, 1787, Scot. NPG [see illus.]
• A. Nasmyth, pencil sketch, 1787, Irvine Burns Club; version, Scot. NPG
• A. Reid, miniature, oils, 1795, Scot. NPG
• A. Reid, watercolour on ivory, 1795–6, Scot. NPG
• A. Skirving, chalk drawing, 1796–8 (after Nasmyth?), Scot. NPG
• medallion, plaster replica, 1801 (after W. Tassie), Scot. NPG
• J. Henning, plaster medallion, 1807, Scot. NPG
• J. Flaxman, marble statue, begun 1824, Scot. NPG ; on loan from the City of Edinburgh District Council
• A. Nasmyth, oil on panel, 1828 (posthumous), Scot. NPG
• D. Dunbar, plaster cast of skull, 1834, Scot. NPG
• J. Edgar, group portrait, wash drawing, 1854 ( Robert Burns at an evening party of Lord Monboddo's, 1786 ), Scot. NPG
• J. Beugo, copperplate engraving (after unfinished portrait by A. Nasmyth; from life), repro. in R. Burns, Poems (1787), frontispiece
• by or after P. Taylor, oils, Scot. NPG
• S. Watson, group portrait, oils ( The inauguration of Robert Burns as poet laureate of the lodge Canongate, Kilwinning, 1787 ), Scot. NPG
• H. W. Williams, watercolour, Scot. NPG
• portrait (after watercolour on ivory), Scot. NPG

Wealth at Death

£15 in drafts; £90 in library valuation; £183 16 s . in debts owed to Burns: Mackay, Burns , 632

View the article for this person in the Dictionary of National Biography archive edition .

• Armour, Jean (1765–1834), wife of Robert Burns and subject of poetry
• Maclehose [née Craig], Agnes (1758–1841), letter writer and poet

More on this topic

• Burns, Robert in Oxford Music Online

External resources

• Bibliography of British and Irish history
• British Library, Discovering Literature
• National Portrait Gallery
• National Archives
• Westminster Abbey, poets' corner
• Royal Academy

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Robert Burns

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, on January 25, 1759. He was the first of William and Agnes Burnes’s seven children. His father, a tenant farmer, educated his children at home. Burns also attended one year of mathematics schooling and, between 1765 and 1768, he attended an “adventure” school established by his father and John Murdock. His father died in bankruptcy in 1784, and Burns and his brother Gilbert took over farm. This hard labor later contributed to the heart trouble that Burns suffered as an adult.

At the age of fifteen, Burns fell in love and, shortly thereafter, he wrote his first poem. As a young man, Burns pursued both love and poetry with uncommon zeal. In 1785, he fathered the first of his fourteen children. His biographer, DeLancey Ferguson, had said, “it was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.” Between 1784 and 1785, Burns also wrote many of the poems collected in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was printed in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions. This collection was an immediate success and Burns was celebrated throughout England and Scotland as a great “peasant-poet.”

In 1788, Burns and his wife, Jean Armour, settled in Ellisland, where Burns was given a commission as an excise officer. He also began to assist James Johnson in collecting folk songs for an anthology entitled The Scots Musical Museum . Burns spent the final twelve years of his life editing and imitating traditional folk songs for this volume and for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs . These volumes were essential in preserving parts of Scotland’s cultural heritage and include such well-known songs as “My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose” and “Auld Land Syne.”

Robert Burns died from heart disease at the age of thirty-seven. On the day of his death, Jean Armour gave birth to his last son, Maxwell.

Most of Burns’s poems were written in Scots. They document and celebrate traditional Scottish culture, expressions of farm life, and class and religious distinctions. Burns wrote in a variety of forms: epistles to friends, ballads , and songs. His best-known poem is the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter . He is also well known for the over three hundred songs he wrote which celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy. Burns died on July 21, 1796, at the age of thirty-seven. Even today, he is often referred to as the National Bard of Scotland.

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Burns : A Biography of Robert Burns Hardcover – September 1, 2004

• Print length 749 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Gardners Books
• Publication date September 1, 2004
• ISBN-10 0907526853
• ISBN-13 978-0907526858
• See all details

Product details

• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Gardners Books (September 1, 2004)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 749 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0907526853
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0907526858
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.38 pounds

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