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Robert Burns
Portrait of Robert Burns by Alexander Nasmyth, 1787, Scottish National Portrait Gallery.
Born	25 January 1759 Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland
Died	21 July 1796 (aged 37) Dumfries, Scotland
Resting place	Burns Mausoleum, Dumfries
Nickname	Rabbie Burns
Occupation	Poet lyricist farmer excise-man
Language	Scots language
Nationality	Scottish
Literary movement	Romanticism
Notable works	«Auld Lang Syne» «To a Mouse» «A Man’s a Man for A’ That» «Ae Fond Kiss» «Scots Wha Hae» «Tam O’Shanter» «Halloween» «The Battle of Sherramuir»
Spouse	Jean Armour
Children	12
Parents	William Burnes Agnes Broun
Signature

Robert Burns (25 January 1759 – 21 July 1796), also known familiarly as Rabbie Burns,^[a] was a Scottish poet and lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland and is celebrated worldwide. He is the best known of the poets who have written in the Scots language, although much of his writing is in a «light Scots dialect» of English, accessible to an audience beyond Scotland. He also wrote in standard English, and in these writings his political or civil commentary is often at its bluntest.

He is regarded as a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a great source of inspiration to the founders of both liberalism and socialism, and a cultural icon in Scotland and among the Scottish diaspora around the world. Celebration of his life and work became almost a national charismatic cult during the 19th and 20th centuries, and his influence has long been strong on Scottish literature. In 2009 he was chosen as the greatest Scot by the Scottish public in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.

As well as making original compositions, Burns also collected folk songs from across Scotland, often revising or adapting them. His poem (and song) «Auld Lang Syne» is often sung at Hogmanay (the last day of the year), and «Scots Wha Hae» served for a long time as an unofficial national anthem of the country. Other poems and songs of Burns that remain well known across the world today include «A Red, Red Rose», «A Man’s a Man for A’ That», «To a Louse», «To a Mouse», «The Battle of Sherramuir», «Tam o’ Shanter» and «Ae Fond Kiss».

Life and background

Ayrshire

The Burns Cottage in Alloway, Ayrshire

Alloway

Burns was born two miles (3 km) south of Ayr, in Alloway, the eldest of the seven children of William Burnes (1721–1784), a self-educated tenant farmer from Dunnottar in the Mearns, and Agnes Broun (1732–1820), the daughter of a Kirkoswald tenant farmer.^[3]^[4]^[5]

He was born in a house built by his father (now the Burns Cottage Museum), where he lived until Easter 1766, when he was seven years old. William Burnes sold the house and took the tenancy of the 70-acre (280,000 m²) Mount Oliphant farm, southeast of Alloway. Here Burns grew up in poverty and hardship, and the severe manual labour of the farm left its traces in a weakened constitution.^[6]

He was given irregular schooling and a lot of his education was with his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief.^[6] He was also taught and tutored by the young teacher John Murdoch (1747–1824), who opened an «adventure school» in Alloway in 1763 and taught Latin, French, and mathematics to both Robert and his brother Gilbert (1760–1827) from 1765 to 1768 until Murdoch left the parish. After a few years of home education, Burns was sent to Dalrymple Parish School in mid-1772 before returning at harvest time to full-time farm labouring until 1773, when he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin.

By the age of 15, Burns was the principal labourer at Mount Oliphant. During the harvest of 1774, he was assisted by Nelly Kilpatrick (1759–1820), who inspired his first attempt at poetry, «O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass». In 1775, he was sent to finish his education with a tutor at Kirkoswald, where he met Peggy Thompson (born 1762), to whom he wrote two songs, «Now Westlin’ Winds» and «I Dream’d I Lay».

Tarbolton

Despite his ability and character, William Burnes was consistently unfortunate, and migrated with his large family from farm to farm without ever being able to improve his circumstances.^[6] At Whitsun, 1777, he removed his large family from the unfavourable conditions of Mount Oliphant to the 130-acre (0.53 km²) farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton, where they stayed until William Burnes’s death in 1784. Subsequently, the family became integrated into the community of Tarbolton. To his father’s disapproval, Robert joined a country dancing school in 1779 and, with Gilbert, formed the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club the following year. His earliest existing letters date from this time, when he began making romantic overtures to Alison Begbie (b. 1762). In spite of four songs written for her and a suggestion that he was willing to marry her, she rejected him.

Robert Burns was initiated into the Masonic lodge St David, Tarbolton, on 4 July 1781, when he was 22. In December 1781, Burns moved temporarily to Irvine to learn to become a flax-dresser, but during the workers’ celebrations for New Year 1781/1782 (which included Burns as a participant) the flax shop caught fire and was burnt to the ground. This venture accordingly came to an end, and Burns went home to Lochlea farm.^[6] During this time he met and befriended Richard Brown, who encouraged him to become a poet. He continued to write poems and songs and began a commonplace book in 1783, while his father fought a legal dispute with his landlord. The case went to the Court of Session, and Burnes was upheld in January 1784, a fortnight before he died.

Mauchline

Robert and Gilbert made an ineffectual struggle to keep on the farm, but after its failure they moved to Mossgiel Farm, near Mauchline, in March, which they maintained with an uphill fight for the next four years. In mid-1784 Burns came to know a group of girls known collectively as The Belles of Mauchline, one of whom was Jean Armour, the daughter of a stonemason from Mauchline.

Love affairs

His first child, Elizabeth «Bess» Burns, was born to his mother’s servant, Elizabeth Paton, while he was embarking on a relationship with Jean Armour, who became pregnant with twins in March 1786. Burns signed a paper attesting his marriage to Jean, but her father «was in the greatest distress, and fainted away». To avoid disgrace, her parents sent her to live with her uncle in Paisley. Although Armour’s father initially forbade it, they were married in 1788.^[7] Armour bore him nine children, three of whom survived infancy.^{[citation needed]}

Burns had encountered financial difficulties due to his lack of success as a farmer. In order to make enough money to support a family, he accepted a job offer from Patrick Douglas, an absentee landowner who lived in Cumnock, to work on his sugar plantations near Port Antonio, Jamaica. Douglas’ plantations were managed by his brother Charles, and the job offer, which had a salary of £30 per annum, entailed working in Jamaica as a «book-keeper», whose duties included serving as an assistant overseer to the Black slaves on the plantations (Burns himself described the position as being «a poor Negro driver»).^[8] The position, which was for a single man, would entail Burns living on a plantation in rustic conditions, as it was unlikely a book keeper would be housed in the plantation’s great house.^[9]^[10] Apologists have argued in Burns’ defence that in 1786, the Scottish abolitionist movement was just beginning to be broadly active.^[11]^[12] Burns’s authorship of «The Slave’s Lament», a 1792 poem argued as an example of his abolitionist views, is disputed. His name is absent from any abolitionist petition written in Scotland during the period, and according to academic Lisa Williams, Burns «is strangely silent on the question of chattel slavery compared to other contemporary poets. Perhaps this was due to his government position, severe limitations on free speech at the time or his association with beneficiaries of the slave trade system».^[13]^[14]

Around the same time, Burns fell in love with a woman named Mary Campbell, whom he had seen in church while he was still living in Tarbolton. She was born near Dunoon and had lived in Campbeltown before moving to work in Ayrshire. He dedicated the poems «The Highland Lassie O», «Highland Mary», and «To Mary in Heaven» to her. His song «Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary, And leave auld Scotia’s shore?» suggests that they planned to emigrate to Jamaica together. Their relationship has been the subject of much conjecture, and it has been suggested that on 14 May 1786 they exchanged Bibles and plighted their troth over the Water of Fail in a traditional form of marriage. Soon afterwards Mary Campbell left her work in Ayrshire, went to the seaport of Greenock, and sailed home to her parents in Campbeltown.^[9]^[10] In October 1786, Mary and her father sailed from Campbeltown to visit her brother in Greenock. Her brother fell ill with typhus, which she also caught while nursing him. She died of typhus on 20 or 21 October 1786 and was buried there.^[10]

Kilmarnock volume

Title page of the Kilmarnock Edition

As Burns lacked the funds to pay for his passage to Jamaica, Gavin Hamilton suggested that he should «publish his poems in the mean time by subscription, as a likely way of getting a little money to provide him more liberally in necessaries for Jamaica.» On 3 April Burns sent proposals for publishing his Scotch Poems to John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, who published these proposals on 14 April 1786, on the same day that Jean Armour’s father tore up the paper in which Burns attested his marriage to Jean. To obtain a certificate that he was a free bachelor, Burns agreed on 25 June to stand for rebuke in the Mauchline kirk for three Sundays. He transferred his share in Mossgiel farm to his brother Gilbert on 22 July, and on 30 July wrote to tell his friend John Richmond that, «Armour has got a warrant to throw me in jail until I can find a warrant for an enormous sum … I am wandering from one friend’s house to another.»^[15]

On 31 July 1786 John Wilson published the volume of works by Robert Burns, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect.^[16] Known as the Kilmarnock volume, it sold for 3 shillings and contained much of his best writing, including «The Twa Dogs» (which features Luath, his Border Collie),^[17] «Address to the Deil», «Halloween», «The Cotter’s Saturday Night», «To a Mouse», «Epitaph for James Smith», and «To a Mountain Daisy», many of which had been written at Mossgiel farm. The success of the work was immediate, and soon he was known across the country.

Burns postponed his planned emigration to Jamaica on 1 September, and was at Mossgiel two days later when he learnt that Jean Armour had given birth to twins. On 4 September Thomas Blacklock wrote a letter expressing admiration for the poetry in the Kilmarnock volume, and suggesting an enlarged second edition.^[16] A copy of it was passed to Burns, who later recalled, «I had taken the last farewell of my few friends, my chest was on the road to Greenock; I had composed the last song I should ever measure in Scotland – ‘The Gloomy night is gathering fast’ – when a letter from Dr Blacklock to a friend of mine overthrew all my schemes, by opening new prospects to my poetic ambition. The Doctor belonged to a set of critics for whose applause I had not dared to hope. His opinion that I would meet with encouragement in Edinburgh for a second edition, fired me so much, that away I posted for that city, without a single acquaintance, or a single letter of introduction.»^[18]

Edinburgh

This manuscript copy of ‘Address to Edinburgh’ written in Burns’ hand, was sent in 1787 to Lady Henrietta Don (nee Cunningham), sister to Earl of Glencairn. The manuscript is now part of the Laing Collection at the University of Edinburgh.

On 27 November 1786 Burns borrowed a pony and set out for Edinburgh. On 14 December William Creech issued subscription bills for the first Edinburgh edition of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect, which was published on 17 April 1787. Within a week of this event, Burns had sold his copyright to Creech for 100 guineas.^[16] For the edition, Creech commissioned Alexander Nasmyth to paint the oval bust-length portrait now in the Scottish National Portrait Gallery, which was engraved to provide a frontispiece for the book. Nasmyth had come to know Burns and his fresh and appealing image has become the basis for almost all subsequent representations of the poet.^[19] In Edinburgh, he was received as an equal by the city’s men of letters—including Dugald Stewart, Robertson, Blair and others—and was a guest at aristocratic gatherings, where he bore himself with unaffected dignity. Here he encountered, and made a lasting impression on, the 16-year-old Walter Scott, who described him later with great admiration:

[His person was strong and robust;] his manners rustic, not clownish, a sort of dignified plainness and simplicity which received part of its effect perhaps from knowledge of his extraordinary talents. His features are presented in Mr Nasmyth’s picture but to me it conveys the idea that they are diminished, as if seen in perspective. I think his countenance was more massive than it looks in any of the portraits … there was a strong expression of 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 literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest. [I never saw such another eye in a human head, though I have seen the most distinguished men of my time.]^[20]

The new edition of his poems brought Burns £400. His stay in the city also resulted in some lifelong friendships, among which were those with Lord Glencairn, and Frances Anna Dunlop (1730–1815),^[20] who became his occasional sponsor and with whom he corresponded for many years until a rift developed. He embarked on a relationship with the separated Agnes «Nancy» McLehose (1758–1841), with whom he exchanged passionate letters under pseudonyms (Burns called himself «Sylvander» and Nancy «Clarinda»). When it became clear that Nancy would not be easily seduced into a physical relationship, Burns moved on to Jenny Clow (1766–1792), Nancy’s domestic servant, who bore him a son, Robert Burns Clow, in 1788. He also had an affair with a servant girl, Margaret «May» Cameron. His relationship with Nancy concluded in 1791 with a final meeting in Edinburgh before she sailed to Jamaica for what turned out to be a short-lived reconciliation with her estranged husband. Before she left, he sent her the manuscript of «Ae Fond Kiss» as a farewell.^{[citation needed]}

In Edinburgh, in early 1787, he met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and music seller with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum. The first volume was published in 1787 and included three songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to volume two, and he ended up responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection, as well as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published in 1803.^[21]

Dumfriesshire

Ellisland Farm

The River Nith at Ellisland Farm.

On his return from Edinburgh in February 1788, he resumed his relationship with Jean Armour and took a lease on Ellisland Farm, Dumfriesshire, settling there in June. He also trained as a gauger or exciseman in case farming continued to be unsuccessful. He was appointed to duties in Customs and Excise in 1789 and eventually gave up the farm in 1791. Meanwhile, in November 1790, he had written his masterpiece, the narrative poem «Tam O’ Shanter». The Ellisland farm beside the river Nith, now holds a unique collection of Burns’s books, artefacts, and manuscripts and is mostly preserved as when Burns and his young family lived there.^{[citation needed]} About this time he was offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of The Star newspaper,^[22] and refused to become a candidate for a newly created Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh,^[22] although influential friends offered to support his claims.^[20] He did however accept membership of the Royal Company of Archers in 1792.^[23]

Ellisland Farm in the time of Robert Burns

Lyricist

After giving up his farm, he removed to Dumfries. It was at this time that, being requested to write lyrics for The Melodies of Scotland, he responded by contributing over 100 songs.^[20] He made major contributions to George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice as well as to James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum.^{[citation needed]} Arguably his claim to immortality chiefly rests on these volumes, which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets.^[20] As a songwriter he provided his own lyrics, sometimes adapted from traditional words. He put words to Scottish folk melodies and airs which he collected, and composed his own arrangements of the music including modifying tunes or recreating melodies on the basis of fragments. In letters he explained that he preferred simplicity, relating songs to spoken language which should be sung in traditional ways. The original instruments would be fiddle and the guitar of the period which was akin to a cittern, but the transcription of songs for piano has resulted in them usually being performed in classical concert or music hall styles.^[24] At the 3 week Celtic Connections festival Glasgow each January, Burns songs are often performed with both fiddle and guitar.

Thomson as a publisher commissioned arrangements of «Scottish, Welsh and Irish Airs» by such eminent composers of the day as Joseph Haydn and Ludwig van Beethoven, with new lyrics. The contributors of lyrics included Burns. While such arrangements had wide popular appeal,^[25]^[26]^[27]^[28] Beethoven’s music was more advanced and difficult to play than Thomson intended.^[29]^[30]

Burns described how he had to master singing the tune before he composed the words:

Burns House in Dumfries, Scotland

My way is: I consider the poetic sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression, then chuse my theme, begin one stanza, when that is composed—which is generally the most difficult part of the business—I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom, humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper, swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my, pen goes.

Burns also worked to collect and preserve Scottish folk songs, sometimes revising, expanding, and adapting them. One of the better known of these collections is The Merry Muses of Caledonia (the title is not Burns’s), a collection of bawdy lyrics that were popular in the music halls of Scotland as late as the 20th century. At Dumfries, he wrote his world famous song «A Man’s a Man for A’ That», which was based on the writings in The Rights of Man by Thomas Paine, one of the chief political theoreticians of the American Revolution. Burns sent the poem anonymously in 1795 to the Glasgow Courier. He was also a radical for reform and wrote poems for democracy, such as – «Parcel of Rogues to the Nation» and the «Rights of Women».

Many of Burns’s most famous poems are songs with the music based upon older traditional songs. For example, «Auld Lang Syne» is set to the traditional tune «Can Ye Labour Lea», «A Red, Red Rose» is set to the tune of «Major Graham» and «The Battle of Sherramuir» is set to the «Cameronian Rant».

Failing health and death

The death room of Robert Burns

Robert Burns Mausoleum at St Michael’s churchyard in Dumfries

Burns’s worldly prospects were perhaps better than they had ever been but he alienated some acquaintances by freely expressing sympathy with the French,^[31] and American Revolutions, for the advocates of democratic reform and votes for all men and the Society of the Friends of the People which advocated Parliamentary Reform. His political views came to the notice of his employers, to which he pleaded his innocence. Burns met other radicals at the Globe Inn Dumfries. As an Exciseman he felt compelled to join the Royal Dumfries Volunteers in March 1795.^[32]
He lived in Dumfries in a two-storey red sandstone house on Mill Hole Brae, now Burns Street. The home is now a museum. He went on long journeys on horseback, often in harsh weather conditions as an Excise Supervisor. He was kept very busy doing reports, father of four young children, song collector and songwriter.
As his health began to give way, he aged prematurely and fell into fits of despondency.^[31] The habits of intemperance (alleged mainly by temperance activist James Currie)^[33] are said to have aggravated his long-standing possible rheumatic heart condition.^[34]

On the morning of 21 July 1796, Burns died in Dumfries, at the age of 37. The funeral took place on Monday 25 July 1796, the day that his son Maxwell was born. He was at first buried in the far corner of St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries; a simple «slab of freestone» was erected as his gravestone by Jean Armour, which some felt insulting to his memory.^[35] His body was eventually moved to its final location in the same cemetery, the Burns Mausoleum, in September 1817.^[36] The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried with his in 1834.^[34]

Armour had taken steps to secure his personal property, partly by liquidating two promissory notes amounting to fifteen pounds sterling (about 1,100 pounds at 2009 prices).^[37] The family went to the Court of Session in 1798 with a plan to support his surviving children by publishing a four-volume edition of his complete works and a biography written by Dr. James Currie. Subscriptions were raised to meet the initial cost of publication, which was in the hands of Thomas Cadell and William Davies in London and William Creech, bookseller in Edinburgh.^[38] Hogg records that fund-raising for Burns’s family was embarrassingly slow, and it took several years to accumulate significant funds through the efforts of John Syme and Alexander Cunningham.^[34]

Burns was posthumously given the freedom of the town of Dumfries.^[33] Hogg records that Burns was given the freedom of the Burgh of Dumfries on 4 June 1787, 9 years before his death, and was also made an Honorary Burgess of Dumfries.^[39]

Through his five surviving children (of 12 born), Burns has over 900 living descendants as of 2019.^[40]

Literary style

Burns’s style is marked by spontaneity, directness, and sincerity, and ranges from the tender intensity of some of his lyrics through the humour of «Tam o’ Shanter» and the satire of «Holy Willie’s Prayer» and «The Holy Fair».^[20]

Burns’s poetry drew upon a substantial familiarity with and knowledge of Classical, Biblical, and English literature, as well as the Scottish Makar tradition.^[41] Burns was skilled in writing not only in the Scots language but also in the Scottish English dialect of the English language. Some of his works, such as «Love and Liberty» (also known as «The Jolly Beggars»), are written in both Scots and English for various effects.^[42]

His themes included republicanism (he lived during the French Revolutionary period) and Radicalism, which he expressed covertly in «Scots Wha Hae», Scottish patriotism, anticlericalism, class inequalities, gender roles, commentary on the Scottish Kirk of his time, Scottish cultural identity, poverty, sexuality, and the beneficial aspects of popular socialising (carousing, Scotch whisky, folk songs, and so forth).^[43]

Statue of Burns in Dumfries town centre, unveiled in 1882

The strong emotional highs and lows associated with many of Burns’s poems have led some, such as Burns biographer Robert Crawford,^[44] to suggest that he suffered from manic depression—a hypothesis that has been supported by analysis of various samples of his handwriting. Burns himself referred to suffering from episodes of what he called «blue devilism». The National Trust for Scotland has downplayed the suggestion on the grounds that evidence is insufficient to support the claim.^[45]

Influence

Britain

Burns is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet, and he influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. His direct literary influences in the use of Scots in poetry were Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. The Edinburgh literati worked to sentimentalise Burns during his life and after his death, dismissing his education by calling him a «heaven-taught ploughman». Burns influenced later Scottish writers, especially Hugh MacDiarmid, who fought to dismantle what he felt had become a sentimental cult that dominated Scottish literature.

Canada

Burns had a significant influence on Alexander McLachlan^[46] and some influence on Robert Service. While this may not be so obvious in Service’s English verse, which is Kiplingesque, it is more readily apparent in his Scots verse.^[47]

Scottish Canadians have embraced Robert Burns as a kind of patron poet and mark his birthday with festivities. ‘Robbie Burns Day’ is celebrated from Newfoundland and Labrador^[48] to Nanaimo.^[49] Every year, Canadian newspapers publish biographies of the poet,^[50] listings of local events^[51] and buffet menus.^[52] Universities mark the date in a range of ways: McMaster University library organized a special collection^[53] and Simon Fraser University’s Centre for Scottish Studies organized a marathon reading of Burns’s poetry.^[54]^[55] Senator Heath Macquarrie quipped of Canada’s first Prime Minister that «While the lovable [Robbie] Burns went in for wine, women and song, his fellow Scot, John A. did not chase women and was not musical!»^[56] ‘Gung Haggis Fat Choy’ is a hybrid of Chinese New Year and Robbie Burns Day, celebrated in Vancouver since the late 1990s.^[57]^[58]

United States

In January 1864, President Abraham Lincoln was invited to attend a Robert Burns celebration by Robert Crawford; and if unable to attend, send a toast. Lincoln composed a toast.^[60]

An example of Burns’s literary influence in the US is seen in the choice by novelist John Steinbeck of the title of his 1937 novel, Of Mice and Men, taken from a line in the second-to-last stanza of «To a Mouse»: «The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.» Burns’s influence on American vernacular poets such as James Whitcomb Riley and Frank Lebby Stanton has been acknowledged by their biographers.^[61] When asked for the source of his greatest creative inspiration, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan selected Burns’s 1794 song «A Red, Red Rose» as the lyric that had the biggest effect on his life.^[62]

The author J. D. Salinger used protagonist Holden Caulfield’s misinterpretation of Burns’s poem «Comin’ Through the Rye» as his title and a main interpretation of Caulfield’s grasping to his childhood in his 1951 novel The Catcher in the Rye. The poem, actually about a rendezvous, is thought by Caulfield to be about saving people from falling out of childhood.^[63]

Russia

Burns became the «people’s poet» of Russia. In Imperial Russia Burns was translated into Russian and became a source of inspiration for the ordinary, oppressed Russian people. In Soviet Russia, he was elevated as the archetypal poet of the people. As a great admirer of the egalitarian ethos behind the American and French Revolutions who expressed his own egalitarianism in poems such as his «Birthday Ode for George Washington» or his «Is There for Honest Poverty» (commonly known as «A Man’s a Man for a’ that»), Burns was well placed for endorsement by the Communist regime as a «progressive» artist. A new translation of Burns begun in 1924 by Samuil Marshak proved enormously popular, selling over 600,000 copies.^[64] The USSR honoured Burns with a commemorative stamp in 1956. He remains popular in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union.^[65]

Honours

Landmarks and organisations

Burns clubs have been founded worldwide. The first one, known as The Mother Club, was founded in Greenock in 1801 by merchants born in Ayrshire, some of whom had known Burns.^[66] The club set its original objectives as «To cherish the name of Robert Burns; to foster a love of his writings, and generally to encourage an interest in the Scottish language and literature.» The club also continues to have local charitable work as a priority.^[67]

Burns’s birthplace in Alloway is now a National Trust for Scotland property called the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum. It includes: the humble Burns Cottage where he was born and spent the first years of his life, a modern museum building which houses more than 5,000 Burns artefacts including his handwritten manuscripts, the historic Alloway Auld Kirk and Brig o Doon which feature in Burns’s masterpiece ‘Tam o Shanter’, and the Burns Monument which was erected in Burns’s honour and finished in 1823.
His house in Dumfries is operated as the Robert Burns House, and the Robert Burns Centre in Dumfries features more exhibits about his life and works. Ellisland Farm in Auldgirth, which he owned from 1788 to 1791, is maintained as a working farm with a museum and interpretation centre by the Friends of Ellisland Farm.

Significant 19th-century monuments to him stand in Alloway, Leith, and Dumfries. An early 20th-century replica of his birthplace cottage belonging to the Burns Club Atlanta stands in Atlanta, Georgia. These are part of a large list of Burns memorials and statues around the world.

Organisations include the Robert Burns Fellowship of the University of Otago in New Zealand, and the Burns Club Atlanta in the United States. Towns named after Burns include Burns, New York, and Burns, Oregon.

In the suburb of Summerhill, Dumfries, the majority of the streets have names with Burns connotations. A British Rail Standard Class 7 steam locomotive was named after him, along with a later Class 87 electric locomotive, No. 87035.^[68] On 24 September 1996, Class 156 diesel unit 156433 was named The Kilmarnock Edition at Girvan station to launch the new Burns Line services between Girvan, Ayr and Kilmarnock, supported by Strathclyde Partnership for Transport.^[69]

Several streets surrounding the Frederick Law Olmsted, Jr.’s Back Bay Fens in Boston, Massachusetts, were designated with Burns connotations. A life-size statue was dedicated in Burns’s honour within the Back Bay Fens of the West Fenway neighbourhood in 1912. It stood until 1972 when it was relocated downtown, sparking protests from the neighbourhood, literary fans, and preservationists of Olmsted’s vision for the Back Bay Fens.

There is a statue of Burns in The Octagon, Dunedin, in the same pose as the one in Dundee. Dunedin’s first European settlers were Scots; Thomas Burns, a nephew of Burns, was one of Dunedin’s founding fathers.

A crater on Mercury is named after Burns.

In November 2012, Burns was awarded the title Honorary Chartered Surveyor^[70] by The Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors, the only posthumous membership so far granted by the institution.

The oldest statue of Burns is in the town of Camperdown, Victoria.^[71] It now hosts an annual Robert Burns Scottish Festival in celebration of the statue and its history.^[72]

In 2020, the Robert Burns Academy in Cumnock, East Ayrshire opened and is named after Burns as an honour of Burns having spent time living in nearby Mauchline.^[73]

Stamps and currency

The Soviet Union was the first country in the world to honour Burns with a commemorative stamp, marking the 160th anniversary of his death in 1956.^[74]

The UK postal service, the Royal Mail, has issued postage stamps commemorating Burns three times. In 1966, two stamps were issued, priced fourpence and one shilling and threepence, both carrying Burns’s portrait. In 1996, an issue commemorating the bicentenary of his death comprised four stamps, priced 19p, 25p, 41p and 60p and including quotes from Burns’s poems. On 22 January 2009, two 1st class stamps were issued by the Royal Mail to commemorate the 250th anniversary of Burns’s birth.^[75]

Burns was pictured on the Clydesdale Bank £5 note from 1971 to 2009.^[76]^[77] On the reverse of the note was a vignette of a field mouse and a wild rose in reference to Burns’s poem «To a Mouse». The Clydesdale Bank’s notes were redesigned in 2009 and, since then, he has been pictured on the front of their £10 note.^[77] In September 2007, the Bank of Scotland redesigned their banknotes to feature famous Scottish bridges. The reverse side of new £5 features Brig o’ Doon, famous from Burns’s poem «Tam o’ Shanter», and pictures the statue of Burns at that site.^[78]

In 1996, the Isle of Man issued a four-coin set of Crown (5/-) pieces on the themes of «Auld Lang Syne», Edinburgh Castle, Revenue Cutter, and Writing Poems.^[79] Tristan da Cunha produced a gold £5 Bicentenary Coin.^[80]

In 2009 the Royal Mint issued a commemorative two pound coin featuring a quote from «Auld Lang Syne».^[81]

Musical tributes

In 1976, singer Jean Redpath, in collaboration with composer Serge Hovey, started to record all of Burns’s songs, with a mixture of traditional and Burns’s own compositions. The project ended when Hovey died, after seven of the planned twenty-two volumes were completed. Redpath also recorded four cassettes of Burns’s songs (re-issued as 3 CDs) for the Scots Musical Museum.^[82]

In 1996, a musical about Burns’s life called Red Red Rose won third place at a competition for new musicals in Denmark. Robert Burns was played by John Barrowman. On 25 January 2008, a musical play about the love affair between Robert Burns and Nancy McLehose entitled Clarinda premiered in Edinburgh before touring Scotland.^[83]^{[citation needed]} The plan was that Clarinda would make its American premiere in Atlantic Beach, FL, at Atlantic Beach Experimental Theatre on 25 January 2013.^[84] Eddi Reader has released two albums, Sings the Songs of Robert Burns and The Songs of Robert Burns Deluxe Edition, about the work of the poet.

Alfred B. Street wrote the words and Henry Tucker wrote the music for a song called Our Own Robbie Burns^[85] in 1856.

Burns suppers

«Great chieftain o’ the puddin-race!» – cutting the haggis at a Burns supper

Burns Night, in effect a second national day, is celebrated on Burns’s birthday, 25 January, with Burns suppers around the world, and is more widely observed in Scotland than the official national day, St. Andrew’s Day. The first Burns supper in The Mother Club in Greenock was held on what was thought to be his birthday on 29 January 1802; in 1803 it was discovered from the Ayr parish records that the correct date was 25 January 1759.^[67]

The format of Burns suppers has changed little since. The basic format starts with a general welcome and announcements, followed with the Selkirk Grace. After the grace comes the piping and cutting of the haggis, when Burns’s famous «Address to a Haggis» is read and the haggis is cut open. The event usually allows for people to start eating just after the haggis is presented. At the end of the meal, a series of toasts, often including a ‘Toast to the Lassies’, and replies are made. This is when the toast to «the immortal memory», an overview of Burns’s life and work, is given. The event usually concludes with the singing of «Auld Lang Syne».

Greatest Scot

In 2009, STV ran a television series and public vote on who was «The Greatest Scot» of all time. Robert Burns won, narrowly beating William Wallace.^[86] A bust of Burns is in the Hall of Heroes of the National Wallace Monument in Stirling.

Crater

A crater on the planet Mercury has been named after Burns.

Notes

^ Burns is also known by various other names and epithets. These include Rabbie Burns, the National Bard, Bard of Ayrshire, the Ploughman Poet, Scotland’s favourite son, Robden of Solway Firth, and simply the Bard.^[1]^[2]

References

^ O’Hagan, A: «The People’s Poet Archived 25 June 2008 at the Wayback Machine», The Guardian, 19 January 2008.
^ «Scotland’s National Bard». scottishexecutive.gov.uk. Scottish Executive. 25 January 2008. Retrieved 10 June 2009.^{[permanent dead link]}
^ «Hall of Fame: Robert Burns (1759–1796)». National Records of Scotland. 31 May 2013. Archived from the original on 28 December 2020. Retrieved 14 April 2018.
^ «Burnes, William». The Burns Encyclopedia. Archived from the original on 23 April 2020. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
^ «Robert Burns 1759 – 1796». The Robert Burns World Federation. Archived from the original on 27 September 2011. Retrieved 25 April 2011.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Cousin 1910, p. 62.
^ «Mauchline kirk session records, National Archives of Scotland». ‘The Legacy of Robert Burns’ feature on the National Archives of Scotland website. National Archives of Scotland. 1 July 2009. Archived from the original on 8 October 2009. Retrieved 21 July 2009.
^ Crawford, Robert (30 April 2011). The Bard. Random House. pp. 222–223. ISBN 9781446466407. Archived from the original on 12 September 2022. Retrieved 26 March 2018.; Leask, Nigel (25 June 2009). «Burns and the Poetics of Abolition». In Carruthers, Gerard (ed.). Edinburgh Companion to Robert Burns. Edinburgh University Press. p. 51. ISBN 9780748636501.; «Letter of Charles Douglas to Patrick Douglas dated Port Antonio 19th June 1786 (page 3 of 3) – Burns Scotland». Archived from the original on 2 August 2016. Retrieved 26 March 2018.
^ ^a ^b Burns 1993, p. 19
^ ^a ^b ^c «Highland Mary (Mary Campbell)». Famous Sons and Daughters of Greenock. Nostalgic Greenock. Archived from the original on 20 February 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2010.
^ «Feature on The Poet Robert Burns». Robert Burns History. Scotland.org. 13 January 2004. Archived from the original on 27 February 2009. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ «Folkin’ For Jamaica: Sly, Robbie and Robert Burns». The Play Ethic. 1 January 2009. Archived from the original on 28 January 2021. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ Mullen, Stephen (4 March 2016). «The myth of Scottish slaves». Sceptical Scot. Retrieved 9 April 2023.
^ Williams, Lisa (9 October 2016). «Remaking our histories: Scotland, Slavery and Empire». National Galleries Scotland. Retrieved 9 April 2023.
^ Burns 1993, pp. 19–20
^ ^a ^b ^c Burns 1993, p. 20
^ «The Twa Dogs» Archived 6 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine – National Trust for Scotland
^ Rev. Thos. Thomson (1856). Chambers, R (ed.). «Significant Scots – Thomas Blacklock». Biographical Dictionary of Eminent Scotsmen. Blackie and Son. Archived from the original on 3 February 2010. Retrieved 17 January 2010.
^ National Galleries of Scotland. «Artists A-Z − − N − Artists A-Z − Online Collection − Collection − National Galleries of Scotland». Archived from the original on 12 September 2022. Retrieved 10 December 2011.
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f Cousin 1910, p. 63.
^ «Robert Burns Country: The Burns Encyclopedia: Johnson, James (c. 1750 — 1811)». www.robertburns.org. Archived from the original on 25 October 2015. Retrieved 13 December 2019.
^ ^a ^b Robert Burns: «Poetry – Poems – Poets Archived 12 May 2011 at the Wayback Machine.» Retrieved on 24 September 2010
^ «Diploma of the Royal Company of Archers». Burns Scotland. Archived from the original on 26 January 2016. Retrieved 3 November 2015.
^ David Sibbald. «Robert Burns the Song Writer». Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ «Folksong Arrangements by Haydn / Folksong Arrangements by Haydn and Beethoven / Projects / Home – Trio van Beethoven». Archived from the original on 4 March 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ «Thomson’s Select Melodies of Scotland, Ireland and Wales (Thomson, George)». Archived from the original on 26 January 2016. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ «25 Schottische Lieder, Op.108 (Beethoven, Ludwig van)». Archived from the original on 23 December 2015. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ «12 Schottische Lieder, WoO 156 (Beethoven, Ludwig van)». Archived from the original on 23 December 2015. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ «Ludwig and Rabbie: a partnership that ended in tears». Archived 1 July 2017 at the Wayback Machine The Independent, 2 December 2005. Retrieved 23 December 2015
^ Beethoven-Haus Bonn (1 April 2002). «Beethoven-Haus Bonn». Archived from the original on 23 December 2015. Retrieved 23 December 2015.
^ ^a ^b Cousin 1910, p. 64.
^ «MS: ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’ – Robert Burns Birthplace Museum». Archived from the original on 6 October 2018. Retrieved 5 May 2013.
^ ^a ^b Robert Burns: «The R.B. Gallery Archived 19 February 2015 at the Wayback Machine.» Retrieved on 24 September 2010
^ ^a ^b ^c Hogg, PS (2008). Robert Burns. The Patriot Bard. Edinburgh : Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84596-412-2. p. 321.
^ «Thomas Hamilton, architect – Joe Rock’s Research Pages». Archived from the original on 2 December 2020. Retrieved 31 December 2012.
^ «Robert Burns Mausoleum». Undiscovered Scotland. Archived from the original on 3 September 2014. Retrieved 27 August 2014.
^ «Testament Dative and Inventory of Robert Burns, 1796, Dumfries Commissary Court (National Archives of Scotland CC5/6/18, pp. 74–75)». ScotlandsPeople website. National Archives of Scotland. Archived from the original on 26 April 2016. Retrieved 21 July 2009.
^ «Appointment of judicial factor for Robert Burns’s children, Court of Session records (National Archives of Scotland CS97/101/15), 1798–1801». ‘The Legacy of Robert Burns’ feature on the National Archives of Scotland website. National Archives of Scotland. 1 July 2009. Archived from the original on 8 October 2009. Retrieved 21 July 2009.
^ Hogg, PS (2008). Robert Burns. The Patriot Bard. Edinburgh : Mainstream Publishing. ISBN 978-1-84596-412-2. p. 154.
^ «Burness Genealogy and Family History – Person Page». Archived from the original on 15 December 2018. Retrieved 27 February 2012.
^ Robert Burns: «Literary Style Archived 16 October 2013 at the Wayback Machine.» Retrieved on 24 September 2010
^ Robert Burns: «some hae meat Archived 8 December 2010 at the Wayback Machine» Retrieved on 24 September 2010
^ Red Star Cafe: «to the Kibble Archived 12 September 2022 at the Wayback Machine» Retrieved on 24 September 2010
^ Rumens, C (16 January 2009). «The Bard, By Robert Crawford». Books. London: The Independent. Archived from the original on 18 January 2009. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ Watson, J (7 June 2009). «Bard in the hand: Trust accused of hiding Burns’s mental illness». Scotland on Sunday. Archived from the original on 10 June 2009. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ Robert Burns and Friends (Essays by W. Ormiston Roy Fellows presented to G. Ross Roy), Patrick Scott & Kenneth Simson, eds., Book Surge Publishing, 2012, ISBN 978-1439270974, Chapter «Alexander McLachlan: ‘The Robert Burns’ of Canada», contribution of Edward J. Cowan, pp. 131–149
^ Burness, Edwina (January 1986). «Burness, Edwina (1986) «The Influence of Burns and Fergusson on the War Poetry of Robert Service,» Studies in Scottish Literature:Vol. 21: Iss. 1″. Studies in Scottish Literature. 21 (1). Archived from the original on 3 January 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Haggis stress». The Western Start. 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 1 February 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Robbie Burns’ life celebrated with poetry and music». Nanaimo Bulletin. 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Ian Hunter: Robbie Burns was the everyman’s poet». National Post. 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Regina weekend round up: Robbie Burns Day». Metro News.ca (Regina). 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 3 February 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Robbie Burns buffet menu». Canadian Living. 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 28 April 2012. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Happy Robbie Burns Day from the ‘Bard’ Himself!». McMaster University Library. 24 January 2013. Archived from the original on 1 February 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Fans of Robbie Burns’ poetry at SFU attempt to break their own world record». Global TV (BC). 25 January 2013. Archived from the original on 16 February 2013. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Ceremonies & Events: Robbie Burns Day». Simon Fraser University. January 2013. Archived from the original on 2 February 2014. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «In Sir John A.’s Footsteps: The Virtual Tour». City of Kingston (Ontario). n.d. Archived from the original on 19 February 2013. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «Gung HAGGIS Fat Choy: Toddish McWong’s Misadventures in Multiculturalism». Archived from the original on 16 January 2013. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «What do you get when you fuse Robbie Burns to Chinese Canadians?». Ugly Chinese Canadian.com. 17 January 2013. Archived from the original on 26 January 2016. Retrieved 27 January 2013.
^ «The Twa Dogs» Archived 6 February 2021 at the Wayback Machine – National Trust for Scotland
^ Crawford, Robert. «The Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.» Robert Crawford to Abraham Lincoln, Saturday, 23 January 1864 (Invitation to attend Robert Burns celebration). 23 January 1864. http://memory.loc.gov/ammem/malquery.html Archived 19 February 2018 at the Wayback Machine (accessed 20 January 2013). Lincoln’s toast: see Collected Works, VIII, 237.
^ See, e.g., Paul Stevenson, «Stanton—the Writer with a Heart» in Atlanta Constitution, 1925 January 18, p. 1; republished by Perry, LL; Wightman, MF (1938), Frank Lebby Stanton: Georgia’s First Post Laureate, Atlanta: Georgia State Department of Education, pp. 8–14
^ Michaels, S (6 October 2008). «Bob Dylan: Robert Burns is my biggest inspiration». The Guardian. London. Archived from the original on 3 September 2014. Retrieved 11 June 2009. Dylan has revealed his greatest inspiration is Scotland’s favourite son, the Bard of Ayrshire, the 18th-century poet known to most as Rabbie Burns. Dylan selected A Red, Red Rose, written by Burns in 1794.
^ «J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye». Sparknotes. Archived from the original on 12 June 2010. Retrieved 14 July 2010. When [Holden] tries to explain why he hates school, she accuses him of not liking anything. He tells her his fantasy of being «the catcher in the rye,» a person who catches little children as they are about to fall off of a cliff. Phoebe tells him that he has misremembered the poem that he took the image from: Robert Burns’s poem says «if a body meet a body, coming through the rye,» not «catch a body.»
^ «Burns Biography». Standrews.com. 27 January 1990. Archived from the original on 11 December 2004. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ Trew, J (10 April 2005). «From Rabbie with love». Scotsman.com Heritage & Culture. Archived from the original on 5 June 2011. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ Gordon, Carl (7 May 1980). «Oldest Burns club opens its doors to the lassies». The Glasgow Herald. p. 4. Archived from the original on 12 September 2022. Retrieved 23 July 2017.
^ ^a ^b «Congratulation Greenock Burns Club». The Robert Burns World Federation Limited. Archived from the original on 26 January 2010. Retrieved 18 January 2010.
^ Poet in motion – Robert Burns takes to the rails for the third time Rail issue 282 3 July 1996 page 52
^ Naming Notes Rail issue 290 23 October 1996 page 53
^ «Posthumous recognition of Burns, the land surveyor». RICS. 19 November 2012. Archived from the original on 15 April 2013. Retrieved 21 November 2012.
^ «Robbie Burns Day: 10 facts you never knew». Simcoe. 21 January 2015. Archived from the original on 21 July 2015. Retrieved 11 June 2015.
^ «Camperdown’s Robert Burns Festival». Victorian Government. Archived from the original on 13 June 2015. Retrieved 12 June 2015.
^ «Burns House Museum, Mauchline – Museums». Archived from the original on 11 January 2021. Retrieved 9 January 2021.
^ Robert Burns World Federation Limited Burns chronicle, Volume 4, Issue 3 p.27. Burns Federation, 1995
^ «Stamps show great British designs». BBC. Retrieved 30 September 2022.
^ «Current Banknotes : Clydesdale Bank». The Committee of Scottish Clearing Bankers. Archived from the original on 3 October 2008. Retrieved 15 October 2008.
^ ^a ^b «Clydesdale launches Homecoming bank notes». The Herald. 14 January 2009. Archived from the original on 12 June 2012. Retrieved 24 January 2012.
^ «Current Banknotes : Bank of Scotland». The Committee of Scottish Clearing Bankers. Archived from the original on 3 October 2008. Retrieved 17 October 2008.
^ Pobjoy Mint Archived 25 May 2012 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved : 27 November 2011
^ £5 Coin Archived 15 March 2012 at the Wayback Machine Retrieved : 27 November 2011
^ «The 2009 Robert Burns £2 Coin Pack». Archived from the original on 18 December 2008. Retrieved 5 January 2009.
^ «THE SONGS OF ROBERT BURNS from the Scots Musical Museum». Jean Redpath Sings. Archived from the original on 5 October 2013. Retrieved 11 January 2014.
^ «Clarinda – The Musical – No woman shunned Robert Burns’ advances, until he met Clarinda!». Clarindathemusical.com. Archived from the original on 9 October 2006. Retrieved 10 June 2009.
^ «Clarinda – The Musical – United States Premiere!». abettheatre.com. Archived from the original on 29 November 2013. Retrieved 15 December 2012.
^ «Our Own Robbie Burns (Tucker, Henry L.)». Archived from the original on 6 September 2015. Retrieved 18 July 2015.
^ Robert Burns voted Greatest Scot Archived 24 September 2014 at the Wayback Machine STV. Retrieved 10 December 2010.

Bibliography

Burns, R (1993). Bold, A (ed.). Rhymer Rab: An Anthology of Poems and Prose. London: Black Swan. ISBN 1-84195-380-6.
Burns, R (2003). Noble, A; Hogg, PS (eds.). The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns. Edinburgh: Canongate Books. ISBN 1-84195-380-6.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Cousin, John William (1910). «Burns, Robert». A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature. London: J. M. Dent & Sons. pp. 62–64 – via Wikisource.
Dietrich Hohmann: Ich, Robert Burns, Biographical Novel, Neues Leben, Berlin 1990 (in German)

External links

Biographical information
Works by or about Robert Burns at Wikisource

Quotations related to Robert Burns at Wikiquote

Media related to Robert Burns at Wikimedia Commons

Poetry recitals

A recital of Tam O’Shanter a Tale
A recital Address to the Unco Guid
A recital of Address to a Haggis
Video recital of Tam o’ Shanter on YouTube
Video recital Address to the Unco Guid or the rigidly righteous on YouTube
A Recital Holly Willie’s Prayer including Epitaph on Holly Willie
Video and commentary on the World’s largest image of Robert Burns, Ardeer, Ayrshire.

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Complete the text about Robert Burns using the words from the box.
hard, was born, over, favourite, started, eldest, celebrate, became, national

Robert Burns, a well−known Scottish poet, was born in 1759. His father was a farmer. There were seven children in the family and Robert was the … . He helped his father on the farm and had to work … . However, from his childhood Robert liked reading. His … writer was William Shakespeare.

At the age of 15 Robert Burns … writing poems. His poems and songs were about ordinary people, their feelings and the beauty of nature. Soon they … very popular. Robert Burns was the author of the famous song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. It has become a … song. Nowadays Scottish people sing it when they … New Year’s Day on 1st January.

Robert Burns died in 1796. People all … the world know and love his poems and songs.

reshalka.com

Английский язык ENJOY ENGLISH Английский с удовольствием 6 класс Биболетова. UNIT 3. HOMEWORK. Номер №16

Решение

Перевод задания
Завершите текст о Роберте Бернсе словами из рамки.
усердно, родился, по, любимый, начал, старший, праздновать, стал, национальный
Роберт Бернс, известный шотландский поэт, родился в 1759 году. Его отец был фермером. В семье было семеро детей, и Роберт был … . Он помогал отцу по хозяйству, и ему приходилось … работать. Однако Роберт с детства любил читать. Его … писателем был Уильям Шекспир.
В 15 лет Роберт Бернс … писать стихи. Его стихи и песни были о простых людях, их чувствах и красоте природы. Вскоре они … очень популярными. Роберт Бернс был автором известной песни «Auld Lang Syne». Она стала … песней. В наши дни шотландцы поют его, когда … Новый год 1 января.
Роберт Бернс умер в 1796 году. Люди … всему миру знают и любят его стихи и песни.

ОТВЕТ

Robert Burns, a well−known Scottish poet, was born in 1759. His father was a farmer. There were seven children in the family and Robert was the esldest. He helped his father on the farm and had to work hard. However, from his childhood Robert liked reading. His favourite writer was William Shakespeare.

At the age of 15 Robert Burns started writing poems. His poems and songs were about ordinary people, their feelings and the beauty of nature. Soon they became very popular. Robert Burns was the author of the famous song ‘Auld Lang Syne’. It has become a national song. Nowadays Scottish people sing it when they celebrate New Year’s Day on 1st January.

Robert Burns died in 1796. People all over the world know and love his poems and songs.

Перевод ответа
Роберт Бернс, известный шотландский поэт, родился в 1759 году. Его отец был фермером. В семье было семеро детей, и Роберт был старшим. Он помогал отцу по хозяйству, и ему приходилось усердно работать. Однако Роберт с детства любил читать. Его любимым писателем был Уильям Шекспир.
В 15 лет Роберт Бернс начал писать стихи. Его стихи и песни были о простых людях, их чувствах и красоте природы. Вскоре они стали очень популярными. Роберт Бернс был автором известной песни «Auld Lang Syne». Она стала национальной песней. В наши дни шотландцы поют его, когда празднуют Новый год 1 января.
Роберт Бернс умер в 1796 году. Люди по всему миру знают и любят его стихи и песни.

Источник

Quick Facts

Also Known As: Rabbie Burns

Died At Age: 37

Family:

Spouse/Ex-: Elizabeth Paton (1760–1799), Elizabeth Paton (1760–1799), Jean Armour (m. 1788–1796)

father: William Burnes

mother: Agnes Broun

siblings: Agnes Burns, Annabella Burns, Gilbert Burns, Isobel Burns, John Burns, William Burns

children: Elizabeth Bishop (Burns), Elizabeth Burns, Elizabeth Riddell Burns, Francis Wallace Burns, James Glencairn Burns, Jean Burns, Maxwell Burns, Robert Burns, Robert Burns Junior, William Nicol Burns

Born Country: Scotland

Quotes By Robert Burns

Poets

Died on: July 21, 1796

place of death: Dumfries, Scotland

Childhood & Early Life

Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, a village located on the River Doon in South Ayrshire, Scotland. At the time of his birth, his father, William Burnes, was a tenant farmer at Ayrshire and wrote A Manual of Religious Belief for the use of his children.

His mother, Agnes nee Broun, sang legends from local oral traditions as well as folk songs while she continued with her heavy chores. Listening to her, Robert developed his love for songs at a young age.

Born eldest of his parents seven children; he had three brothers and three sisters. Next to him was Gilbert, born in 1760, followed by Agnes, Annabella, William, John and finally Isabella.

Robert Burns was initially schooled at home by his father, who taught him reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history. From 1765, Robert started attending an adventure school established by John Murdoch.

In the Easter of 1766, the family moved to Mount Oliphant farm, located southeast of Alloway. For next two years Robert and Gilbert continued to attend the adventure school in Alloway, walking to and fro each day, learning bit of Latin, French and Mathematics, concurrently working at the farm.

Soon he acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a bare smattering of Latin. His teacher, John Murdoch, also instilled in him a love for reading, introducing him to the eighteenth-century English literature. He continued to keep in touch, sending them books even after leaving the area in 1768.

From 1768 onwards, Robert Burns studied with his father, eventually entering Dalrymple Parish School in 1772. But as the harvest time approached, he had to return home to work at the farm. In the following year, he was sent to lodge with Murdoch for three weeks to study grammar, French, and Latin.

By 1774, he had started taking up most of the loads at the farm, laboring all day long. Young, ambitious and restless, he also continued to study at home, reading most of the important 18th-century English writers as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden.

Continue Reading Below

First Poem

In 1774, when he was fifteen years old, Robert Burns became attracted towards a farmhand, a girl called Nelly Kilpatrick, whom his father had employed to assist in the farm. Out of his infatuation was born his first song, O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass, also known as Handsome Nell.

In 1775, he was sent to Kirkoswald to finish his education and there he met a thirteen- year-old girl called Peggy Thompson. She too inspired him to write two songs Now Westlin’ Winds and I Dream’d I Lay.

In 1777, the family moved to a large farm in Lochlea, located near Tarbolton, in search of better fortune. By then, Robert Burns had started working in the farm, toiling hard to assist his father.

In 1781, he moved to Irvine to be trained as a flax-dresser, working at the heckling shop in the Glasgow Vennel for nine months. There he met and befriended Richard Brown, who influenced him greatly, encouraging him to continue writing poems.

Burns had later said «I had the pride before, but he (Brown) taught it to flow in proper channels. His knowledge of the world was vastly superiour to mine, and I was all attention to learn». Although Burns had to return home soon, their friendship continued to flourish.

Tenant Farmer

In 1784, William Burnes passed away, leaving Robert to look after the family. Initially, he and his brother Gilbert tried to maintain the farm at Lochiea, but on failing to do so they moved to the farm at Mossgiel, near Mauchline.

Although he was not very successful as a tenant farmer, Robert Burns rapidly developed his skill in poetry-writing during his stay at Mossgiel. He now began to express his emotions such as love, friendship, amusement or his reactions on social happenings through verses.

Becoming Famous

Sometime in early 1786, Robert Burns decided to migrate to Jamaica to work as a bookkeeper. Since he did not have the funds to pay for the passage, he decided to publish some of the poems he wrote in 1784-1785 by subscription.

Continue Reading Below

On 3 April, 1786, he approached John Wilson, a printer in Kilmarnock, for publishing his poems in book form. On 31 July, his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, saw light of the day. Priced at £3, the work was an instant hit, solving much of his financial problems.

Also known as The Kilmarnock volume, the collection contained such poems as The Cotter’s Saturday Night, which in due course inspired numerous works of art and literature. Other well-known poems include The Twa Dogs, Address to the Deil, Halloween, Epitaph for James Smith, and To a Mountain Daisy.

In Edinburgh

With the success of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, Robert Burns abandoned his plan to go to Jamaica. Instead, he set out for Edinburgh on 27 November 1786. In the same year, he wrote one of his most famous poems, To a Louse, On Seeing One on a Lady’s Bonnet at Church.

In the winter of 1786-1787, he met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver and seller, who loved old Scot songs and was determined to preserve them. As Burns shared his interest, the two began to collaborate, resulting in the publication of the first volume of Scots Musical Museum in 1787.

In 1787, a new edition of his Poems was published, extending his fame beyond the boundary. During this period, he also visited some parts of Scotland, writing the first version of The Battle of Sherramuir while touring the highland in the same year.

In Dumfriesshire

In March 1788, Robert Burns left Edinburgh and in June took a lease on Ellisland Farm in Dumfriesshire. However, it took him one more year before he could settle down there with his newly wedded wife and their young family. Unsuccessful in farming, he joined the Customs and Excise department in 1789.

Continuing to compose, he wrote Auld Lang Syne in 1788, Tam o’ Shanter in 1790. In the following year, he left the farm and settled down in Dumfries, where he lived for the rest of his short life, continuing with his job as an excise officer.

While in Dumfries, he also wrote numerous songs for the Scots Musical Museum, whose final volume was published in 1803, seven years after his death. While some of these songs were original lyrics set in old tunes, he also re-wrote many old lyrics, giving them a new look.

From 1792 onwards, he also contributed to A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. Some of his most cherished works of this period were Highland Mary (1792), Scots Wha Hae (1793), A Red, Red Rose (1794), A Man’s A Man for A’ That (1795), To a Mouse, on Turning Her Up in Her Nest With the Plough (1785(3)) etc.

Major Works

Robert Burns is probably best known for his 1790 long poem Tam o’ Shanter. First published in 1791, the work is about a farmer called Tam and employs a mixture of English and Scottish.

Personal Life & Legacy

On 5 August 1788, Robert Burns married Jean Armour, whom he first met in 1784. They soon went into relationship and their first set of twins was born in 1786. Although he wanted to marry her, her father’s reluctance came in the way and feeling abandoned, he started having other relationships.

As Burns became well-known across Great Britain, Jean’s father relented and they finally got married in 1788, having nine children together. His legitimate children were Robert, Jean, William Nicol, Elizabeth Riddell; James Glencairn, Francis Wallace and Maxwell. That apart, they had a second set of twins, who died in infancy.

He also had at least four children born out of wedlock, the eldest of them being Elizabeth Burns, born in 1785. At her birth he wrote Welcome! lily bonie, sweet, wee dochter, Tho’ ye come here a wee unsought for…

Robert Burns died of heart disease on 21 July 1796. First buried in the far corner of St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries, his mortal remains were moved to the Burns Mausoleum, built in his memory in the same cemetery, in September 1817.

He was posthumously given the Freedom of the Town of Dumfries. Today, the houses he lived in have been turned into museums. He also has his statues erected and parks named after him in different cities across the world.

Источник

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.

Источник

New Year’s Eve celebrations wouldn’t be the same without a chorus of Robert Burns’ ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1796). In his poetry Burns (1759-1796) celebrated the beauty and culture of Scotland. He is known for using the Scots language in his poems, and we celebrate ‘Burns Night’ on the 25th of January as a way to honour Burns to this day.

Fig. 1 — Robert Burns is celebrated for his use of the Scots Language in his poems.

Robert Burns biography

Robert Burns Biography
Birth:	25th January 1759
Death:	21st July 1796
Father:	William Burnes
Mother:	Agnes Broun
Spouse/Partners:	Jean Armour (1788-1796)
Children:	12
Famous Poems:	‘Auld Lang Syne’ ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ ‘To a Mouse’ ‘A Red, Red Rose’ ‘Address to a Haggis’
Nationality:	Scottish
Literary Period:	Romanticism

Early life and education

Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, Scotland. He was the eldest of seven children in a poor farming family. He and his brother Gilbert were first educated at Alloway School, but its closure due to financial trouble meant the brothers were educated for a time by John Murdoch, who had studied in Edinburgh.

After Murdoch left for a job in Dumfries, Burns’ father educated the brothers for a short while before they attended Dalrymple School. From the age of 12 Burns worked on his father’s farm in Ayrshire, though the farm didn’t make much money. The family moved from farm to farm, finding no financial success at any of them. After Robert Burns’ father died in 1784, the family moved to a farm in Mossgiel.

Meeting Jean Armour (1767-1834)

In 1785, a servant on the Burns family farm called Elizabeth Paton (1760-c.1799) gave birth to Burns’ first child. In late 1785 Jean Armour, from the nearby town of Mauchline, became pregnant with twins by Burns.

He wrote a marriage pledge for Armour in 1786, but her father wouldn’t allow the marriage, destroying the pledge and sending her to live with family in Paisley. Armour’s father pursued Burns with the Kirk (the Church of Scotland’s authorities) for having a relationship out of wedlock.

After Jean was sent away to Paisley, Burns started a short-lived relationship with Mary Campbell (c. 1763-1786) who was commonly known as ‘Highland Mary’.

Planned emigration to Jamaica and early success

In 1786, Burns was in serious financial difficulty with the failing Mossgiel farm, so he planned to emigrate to Jamaica for work. To raise money for his journey to Jamaica, he published his first poetry collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in the summer of 1786. This collection is commonly known as the Kilmarnock Edition. The success of this collection improved his finances and his fame as a poet started to blossom.

Mary Campbell died of typhus in October 1786, not long before Burns’ planned departure for Jamaica. The success of his first poetry collection meant that he could scrap his planned emigration to Jamaica and instead take a short trip to Edinburgh to prepare the second edition and look for a patron. He published the Edinburgh edition in 1787 and toured Scotland.

Burns didn’t find a patron, but in Edinburgh in October 1787, Burns started editing a collection of traditional Scottish folk songs called The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803). This six-volume collection went on to feature around 160 of his songs, including his famous love poem ‘A Red, Red Rose’ (1794). The fifth edition features his well-known song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1796).

Meeting Agnes Maclehose (1758-1841)

In December 1787 Burns met Agnes Maclehose (1759-1841) at a tea party in Edinburgh. She was a well-educated woman from Glasgow who had separated from her husband in 1780. Burns and Maclehose started a platonic affair via their letters. They called each other ‘Sylvander’ and ‘Clarinda’ in their letters for confidentiality.

In 1787 Jean Armour became pregnant with Burns’ second pair of twins and her family kicked her out. In February 1788 he started supporting Armour by giving her a place to stay. Soon after, the Kirk formally recognised that Burns and Armour were married.

Burns’ relationship with Agnes Maclehose faded when Burns left Edinburgh in 1788 to live with Armour as husband and wife. By the time Burns left Edinburgh, Maclehose’s maid had given birth to Burns’ child.

Later life and death

In June 1788 Burns and his wife moved to Ellisland Farm near Dumfries. He started work as an excise officer (tax collector) in 1789. The farm was a financial failure, so they moved to Dumfries in 1791.

In 1792 Maclehose left Scotland for the West Indies to reunite with her estranged husband. When Burns learned of her plan to leave in 1791, knowing that he would never see her again, he sent her the love poem ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ (1791) as a parting gift.

Burns died on 21 July 1796 in Dumfries, Scotland. Burns and Armour had nine children together. Their last child was born in 1796, not long after Burns’ death. He fathered 12 children in total. There is not enough scientific evidence to be sure what he died of. The story is that he died because of excessive drinking and/or a heart condition, a much-debated theory. Armour lived in their house in Dumfries until she died in 1834. Only three of her and Robert Burns’ nine children lived longer than she did.

Robert Burns: poems and major works

Robert Burns is a prominent Scottish voice in his major poetic works.

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786)

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (commonly known as the Kilmarnock Edition) was Robert Burns’ first published poetry collection. It was an immediate success and a few thousand copies were sold. The theme of the following two famous poems from the collection is religion.

In the following two poems, Burns satirically assesses prevalent religious beliefs of his time.

‘Address to the Deil’ (1786)

This is a satirical poem written in 1785, poking fun at traditional ideas of Satan. The poem is divided into three parts:

A mock summoning of the Devil using the belittling nicknames people use for the Devil.
A retelling of the Devil’s deeds starting with what the speaker learned from his grandmother’s folktales, before moving into a light-hearted summary of biblical and theological accounts (e.g., Adam and Eve in Eden, the temptation of Job).
A goodbye to the Devil, with the speaker asserting that he could easily outsmart him.

The poem challenges the Calvinist idea that we must live our lives under a persistent fear of Hell. Burns rejected this Calvinist idea as a killer of life’s pleasures.

Calvinism — A branch of Protestantism founded in the 16th Century by John Calvin, a Protestant reformer. The Calvinists believed the Bible had ultimate authority and that its teachings were all we needed to understand God. They wanted the fear of Hell to guide how we live our lives.

Burns prefaces his poem with two lines from John Milton’s epic poem ‘Paradise Lost’ (1677). The speaker of Burns’ poem uses a familiar and lecturing tone to reduce Satan from the powerful figure of ‘Paradise Lost’ to a laughable creature.

In the eighth stanza, the speaker describes how scared he was when he thought he saw Satan in the form of some reeds while out walking one night. His fear (and gullibility) reached a climax when a duck’s quack came from amongst the reeds.

Language Devices in ‘Address to the Deli’

‘Address to the Deil’ uses Habbie stanzas, a form most often used in satirical poems and elegy parodies.

Habbie stanza — A six-line stanza with an AAABAB rhyme scheme. Lines with an A rhyme are in iambic tetrameter, while lines with a B rhyme are in iambic dimeter. This type of stanza is named after a 17th century Scottish poem about a town piper’s death.

Iambic — A pattern of alternating stresses (unstressed then stressed) in a line of poetry.

Iambic tetrameter — Poetic meter of alternating stresses with four stressed syllables on a line.

Iambic dimeter — Poetic meter of alternating stresses with two stressed syllables on a line.

Stanza One of ‘Address to the Deil’

Line 1: O thou! whatever title suit thee,—

Line 6: To scaud poor wretches!

‘The Holy Fair’ (1786)

A humorous poem written in 1765 describing the hustle and bustle of a biannual country fair in Mauchline. It was supposed to prepare people for Communion, but Burns’ poem shows us how it had become simply an excuse for a good time.

The speaker of the poem encounters three young ladies called Fun, Superstition, and Hypocrisy. Fun offers to show the speaker around the lively and crowded fair. The fair is a melting pot of contradiction between religion and secular society: there are a number of preachers at the fair preaching morality, which contrasts with all the drinking and lovemaking of the preachers’ audiences.

In the poem, while some fair-goers are thinking about their sins and sighing in prayer, others are busy thinking about their clothes and cursing people who step on their shoes:

Here some are thinkin’ on their sins,An’ some upo’ their claes;Ane curses feet that fyl’d his shins,Anither sighs an’ prays:

By the end of the fair and the later lunch parties, some revellers are feeling spiritually full, while others are full of alcohol:

There’s some are fou o’ love divine;

There’s some are fou o’ brandy;

‘The Holy Fair’ language devices

The poem follows in the footsteps of the Scots literary tradition of describing popular festivals and celebrations. ‘The Holy Fair’ closely follows the form of ‘Hallow-Fair’ (1772) by Scottish poet Robert Fergusson which describes the shady characters at a Halloween festival — the drunks, the gamblers, and the con-artists.

‘The Holy Fair’ contains 27 stanzas of nine lines each. The rhyme scheme is ABABCDCDE. There are eight syllables on the A and C lines (iambic tetrameter), and six syllables on the B and D lines (iambic trimeter).

Iambic tetrameter — Poetic meter of alternating stresses with four stressed syllables on a line.

Iambic trimeter — Poetic meter of alternating stresses with three stressed syllables on a line.

Opening Lines of ‘The Holy Fair’

Upon a simmer Sunday morn, (A rhyme, iambic tetrameter)

When Nature’s face is fair, (B rhyme, iambic trimeter)

Robert Burns: themes

There are two main themes in Burn’s poetry: Religion and Love.

Religious themes in Burns’ poetry

Burns was brought up in a Presbyterian household and was influenced by the religious and moral values of the 18th century.

In many of his poems, Burns reflects on the nature of religion and the role it plays in society. He often employs religious imagery and references to the Bible in his work, using these to explore questions of morality, spirituality, and the human condition. For example, in his poem ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night,’ Burns uses the image of a humble cotter (tenant farmer) at prayer to reflect on the virtues of simplicity, humility, and devotion.

Burns also wrote poems that address issues of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience. For example, in his poem ‘To a Louse,’ Burns writes about the hypocrisy of those who judge others based on their appearance or religion, rather than their character.

In many of his poems, Burns is critical of the formalities and excesses of religious institutions, instead valuing a more personal, individual faith. This is seen in poems like ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer,’ where Burns satirizes the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of a pious churchgoer.

Overall, the theme of religion in Burns’ poetry is complex and multifaceted. Burns employs religious imagery and references to explore questions of morality, spirituality, and the human condition, often taking a critical and satiric approach to formal religion and its excesses.

Themes of love and separation in the love poems

Burns’ love affairs were the inspiration for much of his love poetry. He wrote some of his love poems as songs so he noted the tunes he wanted these love poems set to. The tunes were traditional Scottish folk tunes.

Love poems for Jean Armour

Jean Armour was the inspiration for 14 of Burns’ love poems, notably ‘Of A’ the Airts the Wind can Blaw’ (1788) which expressed his love for her and as Burns noted was written during their honeymoon:

The powers aboon can only ken,

To whom the heart is seen,

That nane can be sae dear to me

As my sweet lovely Jean!

Burns’ earlier poem, ‘The Belles of Mauchline’ (1784), was written about six young ladies renowned in Mauchline for their beauty. One of them was Jean Armour. In the poem, Burns tells of the beauty of each of the young ladies, before concluding:

But Armour’s the jewel for me o’ them a’.

Love poems for Mary Campbell

Burns had a short relationship in 1786 with Mary Campbell, who died of typhus in October that year. She is commonly known as ‘Highland Mary’. Some believe Campbell was pregnant with Burns’ child when she died, though this is debated. The theme of separation features in the following two poems Burns wrote for Campbell.

‘Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary?’ (1786)

Some believe this poem indicates that Burns intended to take Campbell with him on his planned trip to Jamaica, this is an often-debated point. The poem opens with:

Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,And leave auld Scotia’s shore?Will ye go to the Indies, my Mary,Across th’ Atlantic roar?

In the poem’s final two stanzas, the speaker first asks Campbell to promise him her «faith» and her «lily-white hand» (possibly a suggestion of marriage). The speaker then curses the timing of their falling in love as the reason they cannot stay together (i.e., they have fallen in love just as the speaker is due to leave for Jamaica).

‘The Highland Lassie O’ (1786)

Burns’ relationship with Mary Campbell also inspired this famous poem. Here the speaker is planning on leaving for Jamaica soon. He is certain that the love of his ‘faithful Highland Lassie’ would last through their separation:

Altho’ thro’ foreign climes I range,

I know her heart will never change;

For her bosom burns with honor’s glow,

My faithful Highland Lassie, O-

Love poem for Agnes Maclehose

The theme of separation features in Burns’ well-known love poem ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ (1791). This poem was a parting gift for Maclehose before she left for the West Indies to reunite with her estranged husband. In this poem, the speaker asks Nancy for one last kiss before they separate, never to see each other again.

The speaker is heartbroken that they must separate. Burns refers to Maclehose in the poem as ‘my Nancy’ instead of her confidential pen-name, ‘Clarinda’, which he usually used in his letters. Though their parting fills the speaker of the poem with ‘deep despair’ and ‘heart-wrung tears’, he wishes Nancy ‘peace, enjoyment, love and pleasure’ for the future.

Robert Burns: quotes

Quote 1 from ‘Epistle to a Friend’ (1786)

Burns sent a letter in 1786 to his young friend Andrew Aiken. He starts by saying that the advice he’s going to share is something between a ‘song’ and a ‘sermon’, then encourages Aiken to value honour and independence. Burns advises him to be wary of losing faith in God, but also of strict religion:

The fear o’ hell’s a hangman’s whip,

To haud the wretch in order;

But where ye feel your honour grip,

Let that aye be your border;

Quote 2 from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1796)

This well-known poem is traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve across the UK to welcome the new year. The poem calls on us to think back on old friends and to celebrate old memories. ‘For auld lang syne’ means ‘for old time’s sake’ in the Scots language.

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And never brought to mind?

Should auld acquaintance be forgot,

And auld lang syne!

Quote 3 from ‘Address to a Haggis’ (1786)

Burns’ birthday (25 January) is celebrated as ‘Burns Night’ in Scotland. At Burns Night dinners, traditional Scottish food is served, such as haggis with ‘neeps and tatties’. That’s a pudding made from offal and mincemeat served with swede and potatoes. The meal might start with a reading of Burns’ humorous poem ‘Address to a Haggis’. The opening stanza addresses the ‘sonsie face’ (plump face) of the haggis, and claims it is better than all other sausages with its ‘painch, tripe, or thairm’ (stomach, tripe, or intestines).

Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,

Great chieftain o’ the puddin’-race!

Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,

Painch, tripe, or thaim:

Weel are ye worthy o’ a grace

As lang’s my arm.

Robert Burns: facts and importance to Literature

Burns is Scotland’s most celebrated poet. ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is sung every New Year’s Eve across the UK, and a celebration called Burns Night on the 25th of January marks his birthday.

Burns made great efforts to preserve and actively use the Scots language at a time when more and more readers across the UK were being surrounded by literature in English. He made a significant contribution to the Scottish literary tradition by polishing and preserving traditional Scottish folk songs for anthologies and collections.

Burns is often described as a pre-Romantic poet.

Romanticism was a literary movement of the late 18th and early 19th centuries, the backdrop of which was the rise of big industry, the expansion of coal-guzzling factories, and a growing preference for science’s rigid logic over blind faith.

The Romantics aimed to bring people back to a time before all of this by emphasising the beauty of the natural world and the depth of human emotion in their writing. His celebration of Scotland’s natural beauty, his promotion of individualism, and his exploration of human emotion in his poetry have led some critics to view him as an early contributor to the later literary movement of Romanticism, hence the descriptor pre-Romantic.

In his poem ‘The Answer’ (1787), Burns describes how, even in his youth while he was busy toiling away on the family farm, he had a strong desire to celebrate and record Scotland’s beauty and culture, a desire that he felt would drive him till his dying day:

Ev’n then, a wish (I mind its power) A wish, that to my latest hour Shall strongly heave my breast;

That I for poor auld Scotland’s sakeSome useful plan, or book could make,Or sing a sang at least.

Robert Burns — Key takeaways

Robert Burns was born on January 25th 1759 in Alloway, Scotland and he died on July 21st 1796 in Dumfries, Scotland. His birthday is still celebrated as Burns Night in Scotland and parts of England.
He was the eldest of seven children in a poor farming family. As he was growing up, his family moved around from farm to farm, finding little financial success.
His first published poetry collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) (commonly known as the Kilmarnock Edition) was such a success that he scrapped his plan to emigrate to Jamaica.
Religion, separation, and love are major themes in Robert Burns’ poems. He was known for using the Scots language in his poems.
He wrote the famous song ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1788) which is traditionally sung on New Year’s Eve across the UK.

Источник

Robert Burns (January 25, 1759 – July 21, 1796) was a Scottish poet and songwriter, who is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and the best known poet to have ever written in the Scots language. Burns, however, was much more than just a hero to Scotsmen; he wrote frequently in English and in an English/Scots dialect, making his poems accessible to a wide audience and ensuring his enduring fame. He was a vigorous social and political critic, becoming a champion for the causes of civil and economic equity for all people after witnessing his father’s miserable struggles through poverty. From humble origins and meager education, Burns has become an icon of an impoverished member of the working class rising to intellectual grandeur. By way of his political attitudes and his championing of the working-classes, Burns was also an early pioneer of the Romantic movement that was to sweep Europe in the decades following his death, though he lived well before the term «Romantic» would carry such a connotation.

His influence on English and Scottish literature is far-reaching, and, along with William Wordsworth, Burns is perhaps one of the most enduringly popular and important poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. His status as a cultural icon is maintained through annual celebrations of his birthday in the form of Burns suppers.

Biography

Robert Burns, often abbreviated to simply Burns, and also known as Rabbie Burns, Robbie Burns, Scotland’s favorite son, the Ploughman Poet, the Bard of Ayrshire, and in Scotland simply as The Bard, was born in Alloway, South Ayrshire, Scotland, the son of William Burns, a small farmer, and a man of considerable force of character. His youth was passed in poverty, hardship, and a degree of severe manual labor which left its traces in a premature stoop and weakened constitution. He had little regular schooling, and got much of what education he had from his father, who taught his children reading, writing, arithmetic, geography, and history, and also wrote for them A Manual of Christian Belief. He also received education from a tutor, John Murdock, who opened an «adventure school» in the Alloway parish in 1763 and taught both Robert and his brother Gilbert Latin, French, and mathematics. With all his ability and character, however, the elder Burns was consistently unfortunate, and migrated with his large family from farm to farm without ever being able to improve his circumstances.

In 1781 Burns went to Irvine to become a flax-dresser, but the unfortunate result of a little New Year carousing with fellow workmen, the shop was accidentally set ablaze and burned to the ground. This venture accordingly came to an end. In 1783 he started composing poetry in a traditional style using the Ayrshire dialect of Lowland Scots. In 1784 his father died. Burns and his brother Gilbert made an unsuccessful attempt to keep on the farm; failing that they removed to Mossgiel, where they maintained their uphill struggle for four years.

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect

For the next few years Burns’ life was nothing but hardship. In 1786, Burns fell in love with a woman named Jean Armour, but was devastated when her father refused to marry the couple, even though she was by that time pregnant with Burns’ child. Enraged, Burns sought the hand of another woman, Mary Campbell, who promptly died. Distraught by these failures, and hounded by creditors to pay off the debts of his failing farm, Burns considered emigrating to Jamaica and abandoning the Scotland he had loved so long. Prior to making this decision, however, he decided to travel to the nearby town of Kilmarnock to publish a volume of the poems, under the plain title, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish dialect. The edition contained much of his best work, including The Twa Dogs, Address to the Deil, Hallowe’en, The Cottar’s Saturday Night, To a Mouse, and To a Mountain Daisy; many of which had been written at Mossgiel. The poems, as the title suggests, were written in a half-English/half-Scots dialect largely of Burns’ own devising, and were selected specifically for the Edinburgh audience that Burns hoped to impress through his rural voice and natural imagery. An example of this unique style can be found in his beloved poem The Mouse from this volume:

WEE, sleekit, cow’rin, tim’rous beastie,

O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty,

Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,

Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry man’s dominion,

Has broken nature’s social union,

An’ justifies that ill opinion,

Which makes thee startle

At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,

An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whiles, but thou may thieve;

What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen icker in a thrave

’S a sma’ request;

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,

An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee bit housie, too, in ruin!

It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,

O’ foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,

Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste,

An’ weary winter comin fast,

An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,

Thou thought to dwell—

Till crash! the cruel coulter past

Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,

Has cost thee mony a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the winter’s sleety dribble,

An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane,

In proving foresight may be vain;

The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men

Gang aft agley,

An’lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,

For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me

The present only toucheth thee:

But, Och! I backward cast my e’e.

On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,

I guess an’ fear!

The success of the work was immediate; the poet’s name rang over all Scotland, and he was induced to go to Edinburgh to superintend the issue of a new edition. There he was received as an equal by the brilliant circle of men of letters which the city then boasted, and was a guest at aristocratic tables, where he bore himself with unaffected dignity. Here also Walter Scott, then a boy of 15, saw him and describes him as of «manners rustic, not clownish. His countenance … more massive than it looks in any of the portraits … a strong expression of shrewdness in his lineaments; the eye alone indicated the poetical character and temperament. It was large, and of a dark cast, and literally glowed when he spoke with feeling or interest.» This visit resulted in some life-long friendships, and enough money for Burns to live relatively securely for the rest of his life.

The Scots Musical Museum

In the winter of 1786 in Edinburgh Burns met James Johnson, a struggling music engraver / music seller, with a love of old Scots songs and a determination to preserve them. Burns shared this interest and became an enthusiastic contributor to The Scots Musical Museum, a periodical collection of Scots songs. The first volume of this was published in 1787 and included three songs by Burns. He contributed 40 songs to Volume Two, and would end up responsible for about a third of the 600 songs in the whole collection, as well as making a considerable editorial contribution. The final volume was published in 1803. This publication would mark the beginning of the second phase of Burns’ career, as a musicologist and songwriter, an occupation which occupied him for most of the remainder of his life.

On his return to Ayrshire Burns he renewed his relations with Jean Armour, whom he ultimately married, and took the farm of Ellisland near Dumfries. In the late 1780s he had taken lessons in the duties of an exciseman as a fallback should farming again prove unsuccessful. His popularity growing, at Ellisland his society was cultivated by the local gentry. His literary efforts and his duties in the Customs and Excise proved too much of a distraction to continue farming, a profession which in 1791 Burns gave up permanently.

Meanwhile, he was writing at his best, and in 1790 had produced Tam O’ Shanter, one of his most beloved long poems. About this time he was offered and declined an appointment in London on the staff of the Star newspaper. He soon after also refused to become a candidate for a newly-created Chair of Agriculture in the University of Edinburgh, although influential friends offered to support his appointment.

Asked to furnish words for The Melodies of Scotland, another songbook with Scots lyrics, he responded by contributing over 100 songs. He also made major contributions to George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice. Arguably his claim to immortality chiefly rests on these volumes which placed him in the front rank of lyric poets, and were widely performed and published throughout the British Isles. Burns took a uniquely musical approach to composing his poems and songs of this period, insisting that he would begin with a tune and only when he had found a melody which pleased would he begin to find words to fit the line. His description of this process profoundly influenced the Romantic poets, particularly William Wordsworth, who would succeed in Burns’ style:

My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme; begin one Stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now and then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy and workings of my bosom; humming every now and then the air with the verses I have framed. when I feel my Muse beginning to jade, I retire to the solitary fireside of my study, and there commit my effusions to paper; swinging, at intervals, on the hind-legs of my elbow chair, by way of calling forth my own critical strictures, as my, pen goes.

Following the publication of these numerous songs, Burns’ worldly prospects were now perhaps better than they had ever been; but he was entering upon the last and darkest period of his career. He had become soured, and alienated many of his best friends by too freely expressing his sympathy with both the French Revolution and the then unpopular advocates of reform at home. His health began to give way; he became prematurely old, and fell into fits of despondency. He died on July 21, 1796, depressed at his inability to bring the revolutionary and democratic spirit home to his native Scotland. Within a short time of his death, money started pouring in from all over Scotland to support his widow and children.

His memory is celebrated by Burns clubs across the world; his birthday is an unofficial national day for Scots and those with Scottish ancestry, and his legacy persists as perhaps the single most important author in all of Scotland’s storied history.

Burns’ works and influence

Burns’ direct influences in the use of Scots in poetry were Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. Burns’ poetry also drew upon a substantial familiarity and knowledge of the classics, the Bible, and English literature, as well as the Scottish tradition in which he was steeped. Burns was skilled in writing not only in the Scots language but also in the Scottish English dialect of the English language. Some of his works, such as Love and Liberty (also known as The Jolly Beggars), are written in both Scots and English for various effects.

Burns’ themes included republicanism, Scottish patriotism, and class inequality. Burns and his works were a source of inspiration to the pioneers of liberalism, socialism and the campaign for Scottish self-government, and he is still widely respected by political activists today, ironically even by authoritarian nationalist figures because after his death Burns was appropriated into the fabric of Scotland’s national identity. This, perhaps unique, ability to appeal to all strands of political opinion in the country resulted in his wide acclaim as the national poet of Scotland.

Burns’ revolutionary views and occasionally radical ideas have led some to draw parallels between Burns and William Blake, but while they were contemporaries, based on the available evidence, it appears that they were unaware of each other, despite the fact that they were similar in temperament, attitude, and style. This similarity can be more likely attributed to the fact that they emerged from the same difficult circumstances during the same revolutionary times.

Burns is generally classified as a proto-Romantic poet, and he influenced William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Percy Bysshe Shelley greatly. The Edinburgh literati worked to sentimentalize Burns during his life and after his death, dismissing his education by calling him a «heaven-taught ploughman.» This insistence on Burns’ lack of education is misleading, however; Burns himself played up his own ignorance and humble background to win over the wealthy readers of Edinburgh, but he was clearly not simply an ill-educated farmer who wrote verses on the back of his plough. His father, though poor, had driven the young Burns to read voraciously, and to underestimate his intellectual depth is to do Burns a great disservice. Later Scottish writers, especially Hugh MacDiarmid, fought to dismantle the sentimental Burns cult that had dominated Scottish literature, and thus eventually did away with the idolizing of Burns that Burns himself would have detested.

The genius of Burns is marked by spontaneity, directness, and sincerity, and his variety is marvelous, ranging from the tender intensity of some of his lyrics through the rollicking humor and blazing wit of Tam o’ Shanter to the blistering satire of Holy Willie’s Prayer and The Holy Fair. Burns fought at tremendous odds, and as Thomas Carlyle in his great essay claims, «Granted the ship comes into harbour with shrouds and tackle damaged, the pilot is blameworthy … but to know how blameworthy, tell us first whether his voyage has been round the Globe or only to Ramsgate and the Isle of Dogs.» Burns, ramshackle though he may be, was a writer whose mind voyaged the world and extended far beyond even the grandest expectations.

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

Burns, Robert. The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, ed. Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg. Edinburgh: Canongate, 2003. ISBN 1841953806
Crawford, Robert. The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography. Princeton University Press, 2009. ISBN 0691141711
Thomson, George. A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice. Hansebooks, 2017. ISBN 3744796655

External links

All links retrieved December 14, 2022.

Robert Burns Club based in Alexandria, Scotland
Robert Burns Country: the ‘official’ Robert Burns site
Robert Burns — Maybole Notable
Poetry Archive: 128 poems of Robert Burns

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Источник

Robert Burns: biography

The Scottish poet Robert Burns went down in history of the global literature as a genuine patriot of his people. He came from an ordinary peasant’s family and devoted his life to poetry: Burns chanted the praises of his homeland, stigmatized stupidity and ignorance, created beautiful love ballads, and carefully saved the Scottish folklore. The poet’s masterpieces are known all over the world, and many translators, for instance, the Russian writer Samuil Marshak, worked on his heritage.

Childhood and youth

Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in the village Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland. The boy’s father, William Burnes, was a farmer who married a peasant’s daughter Agnes Broun. The family lived in their own house built by William. When Robert turned seven, the father sold the house to obtain a 70-acre piece of land in Mount Oliphant where the parents moved with their children.

Robert Burns

Thus, little Robert had to face some rough time. As the eldest kid, he had to work like an adult; eventually, his health deteriorated: Robert was weak and sickly. The family lived in the extreme poverty. Seven children had no opportunity to go to school, and the father taught them how to read and write himself. Robert and his brother Gilbert learned how to do sums and studied history and geography as well. Agnes encouraged her sons to read; they loved William Shakespeare’s and John Milton’s poems. However, the Scottish poet Robert Fergusson was the young talent’s favorite. Besides, the mother instilled the love for the Scottish language and folklore in the boy: he adored Scottish songs, fairy tales, and ballads.

The house where Robert Burns was born

When the brothers grew up, they attended a village school where John Murdoch taught them Latin and French. Robert used to study at various schools in Dalrymple and Kirkoswald, yet he had to drop to assist his father with harvesting.

Following his romantic urges, the young man began to write at 15 or 16: he created poetic declarations of his feelings to Nelly Kilpatrick, a village girl. When Robert went to Kirkoswald school, he met Peggy Thompson; he devoted her the poems “Now Westlin’ Winds» and «I Dream’d I Lay».

The portrait of Robert Burns

In 1777, the young man’s life changed: the father got fed up with his misfortune and moved to Lochlea, not far from Tarbolton. To his dissatisfaction, the brothers began to participate in Tarbolton social life: they joined a village dance school and founded the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club. Soon, Robert fell in love with a local beauty Alison Begbie and devoted her many songs. Nevertheless, she rejected the young man.

1781 brought unique moments: the young man joined the Lodge St David and met Captain Richard Brown. He had traveled halfway around the world and proved to be an excellent storyteller. Brown strengthened Robert’s confidence and approved of his poetry.

In 1784, Burns’s father died, and the young man’s relatively careless life changed.

Poetry

The brothers sold the farm and moved to Mossgiel. Robert needed money desperately and decided to publish his poems to earn something and go to West India. Luckily, he had a lot of materials. In 1786, the young man’s debuting collection Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was released.

The poet Robert Burns

The artist did not expect the success, yet the first book brought him enough money and popularity: those who liked the genre were touched by the unknown poet’s works. Thus, Burns could join the Edinburg high society.

In the course of time, the poet’s works brought him even more benefits. Several editions of his books were created, and many readers quoted his poems. Robert Burns was into satire, romanticism, and didactics; his language was simple and comprehensible. The man wrote about ordinary people’s lives, nature in Scotland, unconditional love, and merry peasant celebrations.

A collection of Robert Burns’s poems, 1794

Literature lovers were glad to have him as their guest at literary salons and creative evenings. In 1787, the Grand Lodge of Scotland named him Caledonia’s bard.

In the course of time, Burns was bored by the high society. As he mentioned, he felt the noble people’s superior attitude because of his peasant background. In 1788, the poet returned to the village and married the woman he loved.

In 1789, Burns became a Customs and Excise bureaucrat; at the same time, he worked on Scots Musical Museum and edited everything that seemed frivolous to him. This book helped save a lot of works from the Scottish folklore heritage.

Despite his civil service and social activities, Robert Burns did not stop writing: he created Ode, sacred to the Memory of Mrs. Oswald (1789) and Tam o’ Shanter (1790). In 1793, the second two-volume collection of poems was published in Edinburg. By that time, the poet was seriously ill: he had frequent heart attacks and often fainted.

In 1795, the man created the poem A Man’s a Man for A’ That: he praised a personality outside the limits of social groups and earnings. It was Robert’s last work. Overall, the Scottish poet left a rich literary heritage: more than 500 poems and 300 songs.

The genius was truly appreciated after his death. Thanks to translators’ work, people speaking dozens of languages got familiar with the poet’s art.

Personal life

There are many biographical books about Burns’s personal life: the poet was known for his passion. He had many out-of-wedlock children. Overall, he fathered 12 children from four women. Judging by portraits, Robert was handsome; he started conquering women’s hearts from his youth.

The engagement of Robert Burns and Mary Campbell

The first illegitimate child, the daughter Elizabeth, was born when Burns was 21; the servant of his mother, Betty, was the girl’s mother. While Robert acknowledged the child, Betty rejected her. Thus, the young man’s mother and sisters brought up the kid. The village disapproved of Burns’s behavior. Although he was allowed to attend church services, he had to take a repentance bench.

Burns did not learn his lesson. Soon, he met a cheerful beauty Jean Armour, the daughter of a wealthy contractor. The young man immediately fell in love; new poems were flowing. Some of them appeared in the poet’s first collection. In 1786, Jean got pregnant, and the couple married secretly. The woman gave birth to twins. However, her father got furious and annulled the document: he did not want a poor and cheating son-in-law.

Jean Armour

Upset and offended, Robert found comfort with Mary Campbell who died of typhoid soon. In Edinburg, the heartbreaker’s life was full of adventures. By the time he came back to the village, his lover Jenny Clow had given birth to a son Robert. Finally, some Ann Park became the fourth woman who bore the illegitimate daughter Betty.

In 1788, Robert married Jean Armour who had been thrown out of the house by her father and lived with an acquaintance. Overall, she gave birth to nine children six of whom died in infancy. According to the poet’s biographers, he did not stop to cheat on his wife until the end of his life.

Death

The poet spent his last years in poverty; he was weak because of a heart disease he had “earned” in his childhood while working hard on a farm. In 1796, Burns moved to Dumfries and joined the Royal Dumfries Volunteers.

Robert Burns passed away on July 21, 1796. He was 37 years old.

The room where Robert Burns died

The rheumatic heart disease was the cause of death. The Scottish poet was buried in Dumfries with great honors.

Burns’s fans celebrate his birthday on October 25: they call it “Burns Night”. Haggis is an indispensable part of the event: the poet loved it and devoted it one of his works.

Quotes

“They never, never can divide My heart and soul from thee”.

“And there’s a hand my trusty friend and give a hand o’ thine! And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne”.

“Then catch the moments as they fly, And use them as ye ought, man: Believe me, happiness is shy, And comes not aye when sought, man”.

Poems

“My heart’s in the Highlands”
“Such A Parcel of Rogues in A Nation”
“Rantin’, Rovin’ Robin”
“My Father Was A Farmer”
“A Man’s A Man For A’ That”
“John Barleycorn: A Ballad”
“Address to a Haggis”
«The Jolly Beggars: A Cantata»
«A Girl with A Dowry»

Photo

Источник

Image of Robert Burns, based on a 1787 portrait by Alexander Naysmith.

Robert Burns, often referred to affectionately as Robbie Burns or Rabbie Burns, (January 25, 1759 — July 21, 1796) was a Scottish poet and lyricist who is considered to be the national poet of Scotland. He is best known for his poetry in the Scots language^[1], although he also wrote works, intended for non-Scottish readers to understand, in a light Scots dialect of English and standard English, some of his works existing in both Scots and English versions. Burns political and social views are often most clearly expressed in his English-language works. Burns’ lyrics to «Auld Lang Syne» are sung, in a slightly modified form, at New Year celebrations around the world and his «Scots Wha Hae» long served as an unofficial Scottish national anthem. His other well known works include «A Red, Red Rose», «A Man’s A Man for A’ That», «To A Mouse», «Ae First Kiss», «The Battle of Sherramuir», «Address to a Haggis», «Tam O’Shanter» and «Halloween».

Burns is considered a precursor to the Romantic poets of the late 18th and early 19th centuries and influenced later liberal and socialist political movements. Burns works and Scottish culture in general are celebrated on the anniversary of his birth, Burns Night, in Scotland and by people of Scottish descent around the world.

In 2009, Burns was named in a poll conducted by the Scottish television channel STV as the greatest Scot in history.

Biography

Postage stamp bearing an image of Robert Burns, issued by the Soviet Union in 1956.

Robert Burns was born in Alloway in the south-west Scottish county of Ayrshire on January 25, 1759. He was the first of the seven children of tenant farmer William Burnes^[2] and Agnes Broun. He attended Dalrymple Parish School for a short while but was largely educated by his father and other private tutors. He began working as a farm laborer at a young age. The strenuous physical work which he did permanently damaged his health. Burns first known poem «O, Once I Lov’d A Bonnie Lass» was written in 1775 when he was 15.

In 1786, Burns was offered a job as an accountant on a slave plantation in Jamaica.^[3] Not being able to afford to pay for his passage to Jamaica, Burns was advised to raise money by having a volume of his poetry published. The first edition of his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published on July 31, 1786 and was an immediate success. Instead of emigrating to Jamaica, Burns moved to Edinburgh and settled comfortably into the city’s literary society.

Statue of Robert Burns in Dumfries, Scotland.

Burns returned to his home county of Ayrshire in 1788 and took up farming again, although he also continued to write poetry. In 1791, he sold his farm, moved to the neighboring county of Dumfries and Galloway and settled in the town of Dumfries. He contributed to collections of Scottish folk songs and popular songs, often altering and expanding the lyrics of the songs and writing new lyrics to already existing tunes.

It has been suggested that Burns suffered from manic depression, alcoholism and a rheumatic heart condition. His ill health left him looking prematurely aged. Burns died on July 21, 1796 at the age of 37. He was originally buried under a simple gravestone in St. Michael’s Churchyard, Dumfries but his body was moved to the Burns Mausoleum in the same cemetery in September 1815.

Burns married Jean Armour in 1788 but is also known to have had relationships with Elizabeth Patron, Mary Campbell, Agnes McLehose, Jenny Clow and Margaret Cameron. He fathered a total of twelve children.

Burns Night

A man recites Burns’ «Address to a Haggis» at a formal Burns supper in Oxford, England in 2004.

The anniversary of Robert Burns’ birth on January 25, Burns Night, is celebrated by many people in Scotland as an unofficial second national day.^[4] The day is also widely celebrated in Northern Ireland, where many members of the Protestant community have Scottish ancestry. Burns Night celebrations are also held by other people of Scottish descent, as well as by lovers of Burns’ poetry, around the world.

Burns Night, or an evening close to it, is most often celebrated by having a Burns supper, although such a supper in celebration of Burns’ life and works can be held at any time of the year. A Burns supper may be either formal, at which there is a ceremony of ten steps which must be strictly adhered to, or informal. Both kinds of suppers typically feature readings of Burns’ poetry and traditional Scottish dishes of haggis, turnips and potatoes, accompanied by Scotch whisky.

The first Burns suppers were held in the late 18th century by friends of the poet on the anniversary of his death, July 21. The first Burns Club, which included some members who had known Robert Burns personally, was founded in the Scottish town of Greenock in 1801 and began the tradition of holding the supper on the anniversary of the poet’s birth instead.

Footnotes

↑ Scots is a language closely related, but not identical, to English. Native speakers of English may be able to read and understand Scots without much difficulty but are unlikely to understand every word.
↑ Robert Burns spelled his surname as «Burnes» until 1786.
↑ Burns made his own opposition to slavery clear in the 1792 poem «The Slave’s Lament».
↑ The official national day of Scotland is St. Andrew’s Day on November 30.

External links

Works of Robert Burns on Wikisource.
Quotations from Robert Burns on Wikiquote.
Free public domain audiobooks of Robert Burns’ works from LibriVox.

Источник

Life and background

Ayrshire

Alloway

Tarbolton

Mauchline

Love affairs

Kilmarnock volume

Edinburgh

Dumfriesshire

Ellisland Farm

Lyricist

Failing health and death

Literary style

Influence

Britain

Canada

United States

Russia

Honours

Landmarks and organisations

Stamps and currency

Musical tributes

Burns suppers

Greatest Scot

Crater

See also

Notes

References

Bibliography

External links

Английский язык ENJOY ENGLISH Английский с удовольствием 6 класс Биболетова. UNIT 3. HOMEWORK. Номер №16

Решение

Robert Burns biography

Early life and education

Meeting Jean Armour (1767-1834)

Planned emigration to Jamaica and early success

Meeting Agnes Maclehose (1758-1841)

Later life and death

Robert Burns: poems and major works

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786)

‘Address to the Deil’ (1786)

Language Devices in ‘Address to the Deli’

‘The Holy Fair’ (1786)

‘The Holy Fair’ language devices

Robert Burns: themes

Religious themes in Burns’ poetry

Themes of love and separation in the love poems

Love poems for Jean Armour

Love poems for Mary Campbell

Love poem for Agnes Maclehose

Robert Burns: quotes

Quote 1 from ‘Epistle to a Friend’ (1786)

Quote 2 from ‘Auld Lang Syne’ (1796)

Quote 3 from ‘Address to a Haggis’ (1786)

Robert Burns: facts and importance to Literature

Robert Burns — Key takeaways

Biography

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect

The Scots Musical Museum

Burns’ works and influence

References ISBN links support NWE through referral fees

External links

Credits

Robert Burns: biography

Childhood and youth

Poetry

Personal life

Death

Quotes

Poems

Photo

Biography

Burns Night

Footnotes

External links

References

ISBN links support NWE through referral fees