robert burns biography

Robert Burns

(1759-1796)

Who Was Robert Burns?

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

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

The Life of a Lover and Writer

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

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

Achievement and Sudden Fame

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

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

Later Years and Death

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

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

QUICK FACTS

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

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CITATION INFORMATION

• Article Title: Robert Burns Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
• Website Name: The Biography.com website
• Url: https://www.biography.com/writer/robert-burns
• Access Date:
• Publisher: A&E; Television Networks
• Last Updated: May 25, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
• The best plans of men and mice often go awry.
• There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing.
• Oh, my luve's like a red, red rose, That's newly sprung in June; Oh, my luve's like the melodie That's sweetly played in tune
• Dare to be honest and fear no labor.

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Robert Burns

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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.

Address to the Devil

Ae fond kiss, afton water.

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Bibliography

Ca' the yowes to the knowes, comin thro' the rye, duncan gray, for a' that and a' that, from lines to william simson, highland mary, "how can i keep my maidenhead", it was a' for our rightful king, "john anderson my jo, john", last may a braw wooer, mary morison, a red, red rose, scots wha hae, tam o 'shanter, to a mountain daisy, winter: a dirge, a winter night, ye flowery banks (bonie doon).

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• Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (Kilmarnock: Printed by John Wilson, 1786; revised and enlarged edition, Edinburgh: Printed for the author, and sold by William Creech, 1787; Philadelphia: Printed for, and sold by Peter Stewart and George Hyde, 1788; enlarged edition, 2 volumes, Edinburgh: Printed for T. Cadell, London, and William Creech, Edinburgh, 1793).
• The Works of Robert Burns: With an Account of His Life, and a Criticism of His Writings. To Which Are Prefixed, Some Observations of the Character and Condition of the Scottish Peasantry, 4 volumes, edited by James Currie (Liverpool: Printed by J. M'Creery; for T. Cadell, Jun. and W. Davies, London; and W. Creech, Edinburgh, 1800).
• The Works of Robert Burns, 5 volumes, edited by James Hogg and William Motherwell (Glasgow: Fullarton, 1834-1836).
• The Life and Works of Robert Burns, edited by P. Hateley Waddell (Glasgow: Wilson, 1867).
• The Life and Works of Robert Burns, 4 volumes, edited by Robert Chambers, revised by William Wallace (Edinburgh: Chambers, 1896).
• The Poetry of Robert Burns, 4 volumes, edited by W. E. Henley and T. F. Henderson (Edinburgh: Jack, 1896-1897).
• The Songs of Robert Burns, edited by J. C. Dick (London & New York: Frowde, 1903); reprinted, with "Notes on Scottish Songs by Robert Burns" (Hatboro, Pa.: Folklore Associates, 1962).
• Robert Burns's Commonplace Book 1783-1785, facsimile edition, edited by J. C. Ewing and Davidson Cook (Glasgow: Cowans & Gray, 1938).
• The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 volumes, edited by James Kinsley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1968).
• The Scots Musical Museum, 6 volumes, edited by Burns and James Johnson, with contributions by Burns (Edinburgh: Printed and sold by James Johnson, 1787-1803).
• A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice, 5 volumes, edited by George Thomson, with contributions by Burns (London: Preston & Son, 1793-1818).
• The Merry Muses of Caledonia: A Collection of Favorite Scots Songs, attributed to Burns as editor and contributor (Edinburgh?: Peter Hill?, 1800?); republished as The Merry Muses of Caledonia: Collected and in Part Written by Robert Burns, edited by Gershon Legman (New Hyde Park, N.Y.: University Books, 1965).
• The Letters of Robert Burns, 2 volumes, edited by J. De Lancey Ferguson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931); second edition, 2 volumes, edited by G. Ross Roy (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985).

The main collections of manuscript materials by Robert Burns are in the Burns Cottage Collection, Alloway; the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the British Museum; the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh; the Adam Collection of the Rosenbach Company, Philadelphia; the Kilmarnock Monument Museum; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and the Edinburgh University Library.

Further Readings

• J. W. Egerer, A Bibilography of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1964).
• J. G. Lockhart, The Life of Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Constable, 1828).
• John MacIntosh, Life of Robert Burns (Paisley, U.K.: Gardner, 1906; reprinted, New York: AMS Press, 1975).
• Franklin Bliss Snyder, The Life of Robert Burns (New York: Macmillan, 1932).
• J. De Lancey Ferguson, Pride and Passion (New York: Oxford University Press, 1939).
• R. T. Fitzhugh, ed., Robert Burns: His Associates and Contemporaries (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1943).
• R. D. Thornton, James Currie: The Entire Stranger and Robert Burns (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1963).
• Maurice Lindsay, The Burns Encyclopedia, third edition (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980).
• Auguste Angellier, Etude sur la vie et les oeuvres de Robert Burns, 2 volumes (Paris: Hachette, 1893).
• Mary Ellen Brown, Burns and Tradition (London: Macmillan, 1984).
• David Buchan, The Ballad and the Folk (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1972).
• David Craig, Scottish Literature and the Scottish People 1680-1830 (London: Chatto & Windus, 1961).
• Thomas Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1960).
• Crawford, Society and the Lyric (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1979).
• R. H. Cromek, ed., Reliques of Robert Burns; Consisting of Original Letters, Poems, and Critical Observations on Scottish Songs (London: McCreery, 1808).
• David Daiches, Robert Burns (London: Bell, 1952).
• Catarina Ericson-Roos, The Songs of Robert Burns: A Study of the Unity of Poetry and Music (Uppsala, Swed.: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis, Studia Anglistica Upsaliensia, 1977).
• Hans Hecht, Robert Burns: The Man and His Work (London: Hodge, 1936).
• R. D. S. Jack and Andrew Noble, eds., The Art of Robert Burns (London: Vision, 1982; Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble, 1982).
• Maurice Lindsay, Burns: The Man, His Work, the Legend (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1971).
• Donald A. Low, ed., Critical Essays on Robert Burns (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1975).
• Low, ed., The Critical Heritage (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1974).
• Carol McGuirk, Robert Burns and the Sentimental Era (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1985).
• Kurt Wittig, The Scottish Tradition in Literature (Edinburgh: Oliver & Boyd, 1958).
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Robert Burns

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

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

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

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

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

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Biography Online

Robert Burns Biography

Robert Burns was born at Alloway, near Ayr, on January 25, 1759. Robert was educated briefly in Alloway before going to Ayr. However, whilst studying his family were beset by financial concerns and Burns was forced to work as a farm labourer. Burns had to work at a variety of labouring jobs, but, in his spare time, began to compose poetry and songs.

“But to see her was to love her, Love but her, and love forever. Had we never lou’d sae kindly, Had we never lou’d sae blindly, Never met – or never parted – We had ne’er been broken hearted”

– Robert Burns

When his father died in 1784, with his brother Gilbert, he rented a farm near Mauchline; but this was never a great financial success, and he toyed with the idea of moving to Jamaica in the West Indies. However, in 1786, his first works were published under the title “ Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect “. These included works such as ‘To a Mouse’ and ‘The Holy Fair’. The critical reception and relative success of this publication encouraged Burns to remain in Scotland and he moved to Edinburgh where he became involved in the thriving cultural scene. He was also initiated into the Masons and became the poet laureate of the Edinburgh Freemasons.

His reputation led to a commission to work on a collection of Scottish folk songs. Burns collected a rich diversity of Scottish folk songs, sometimes improving upon them and also including his own. These were published as ‘The Scots Musical Museum’ in five volumes over a period of sixteen years.

This compilation included a reworking of ‘ Auld Lang Syne ‘ which later became a famous global song, usually sung on New Year’s Eve.

“Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind? Should auld acquaintance be forgot and days of auld lang syne? For auld lang syne, my dear, for auld lang syne, we’ll take a cup of kindness yet, for auld lang syne.”

— Robert Burns

Guinness World Records accepts it is the third most popular song in the world (after “Happy Birthday” and “For he’s a jolly good fellow”

In 1788, Burns married Jean Armour and together they had nine children. However, he also had a string of affairs and lovers, such as Mary Campbell.

Burns was also a political writer and was considered a radical for his forthright views on republicanism. In 1795, he was moved by the events of the French revolution and its clarion call for equality. He died one year later on July 21, 1796, of rheumatic fever. He was buried in St Michael’s Dumfries.

During his lifetime, he was well known but gained little financial compensation for his works. However, after his death, his reputation blossomed and he became an icon of Scottish culture. He was also celebrated in Russia as a poet of the people.

Burns Night, effectively a second national day is celebrated on 25 January with Burns suppers around the world and is still more widely observed than the official national day, St. Andrew’s Day.

He wrote in a mixture of English, and a Scottish lowland dialect.

Robert Burns died on 21 July 1796 , aged just 31. He had been ill for several years prior, complaining of stiff joints and fever amongst other things. There is a dispute about the causes of his death. Burns had a reputation for being a heavy drinker and one of his early biographers, Dr. James Currie, assumed that his heavy drinking was the cause of his death. It was widely circulated Burns died from rheumatism after being found freezing cold in a street after a night’s drinking. However, according to Stewart Cameron of the Halifax Burns Club, his death was attributed to terminal heart failure from bacterial endocarditis, as a complication of rheumatic fever. ( Scotsman ) Robert Burns died owing £14.

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Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

The life of robert burns, who was robert burns.

Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns sits proudly atop the pantheon of Scottish poets. From ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’ to his ‘ Address to a Haggis ’, Burns’s work is intrinsically linked with Scottish culture.

His journey from humble rural beginnings to international renown tells the story of a man inspired by nature, class culture and love.

Burns was born in Alloway in 1759, in a cottage that his father built . He was the eldest son of tenant farmers William Burnes and Agnes Broun, but despite their modest status Robert’s parents insisted he was educated. He was encouraged to read from an early age, and even attended one year of mathematics schooling.

The young Burns was more interested in things that gave him pleasure – poetry, nature, women, drink – than he was in farm work. When his father died in 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert took over the farm, but within a few years they were in financial trouble. To make matters worse, Burns was already the father of an illegitimate child – the first of his 13 children.

Relationships with women

Burns pursued love as energetically as he did poetry, and his passion for women defined his life and work in equal measure. From his teenage years through the peak of his career, he engaged in many illicit relationships, sometimes overlapping with each other.

However, there was one woman who was a constant in Burns’s adult life: Jean Armour. They would go on to spend most of their lives together, but when they first tried to marry, Armour’s family tore up the contract. Outraged, Burns supposedly tried to flee to the Caribbean with another woman called Mary Campbell (also known as ‘Highland Mary’), but was eventually convinced to stay in Scotland as by then his poems were beginning to attract plenty of attention.

Work & inspiration

Despite his domestic chaos, Burns managed to publish his first collection in the summer of 1786 – it made him a literary superstar at the tender age of 27.

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was the result of an incredible poetic outpouring between 1784 and 1786. It was made up of all manner of works, including poems like ‘ To a Mouse ’ and ‘Address to the Deil’, that reflected Burns’s upbringing, his connection to rural life and above all his interest in the human condition.

After the success of this first collection, Burns spent some time in Edinburgh before officially marrying Jean Armour in 1788 and moving to Dumfries. In 1790, he penned the great narrative poem Tam o’ Shanter , a mock-heroic tale about a feckless farmer, that was rooted in Burns’s love for Scottish culture. This work immortalised Alloway Auld Kirk , Souter Johnnie and the Brig o’ Doon .

Burns’s passion for Scotland and its cultural traditions came to the fore during the last decade of his life, when he worked on The Scots Musical Museum and A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs . Putting words to traditional folk songs as well as composing his own tunes, Burns contributed hundreds of songs and lyrical poems to these volumes, including ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’, ‘ A Red, Red Rose ’ and ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’.

Did you know?

Burns’s handwritten manuscript of Tam o’ Shanter had several controversial lines that he was advised to take out before publication.

Death & legacy

Robert Burns died at the age of 37, in 1796, from a rheumatic heart condition. Jean Armour gave birth to their last son, Maxwell, on the day of her husband’s funeral.

Burns’s legacy lives on across Scotland and around the world – in many countries it’s now traditional to sing ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’ when seeing in the new year. Over the centuries, Burns’s work has inspired poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, and has seen him celebrated in songs, paintings and even stamps.

On 25 January 1859, on the centenary of his birth, memorial events were held all over Scotland, and now Burns Night is virtually a national holiday! In honour of our greatest poet, we sing songs, read aloud, drink plenty of whisky and address Scotland’s national dish using Burns’s own poem ‘ To a Haggis ’.

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Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns

Robert Burns is the best loved Scottish poet, admired not only for his verse and great love-songs, but also for his character, his high spirits, ‘kirk-defying’, hard drinking and womanising!

Ben Johnson

Robert Burns is the best loved Scottish poet, admired not only for his verse and great love-songs, but also for his character, his high spirits, ‘kirk-defying’, hard drinking and womanising! He came to fame as a poet when he was 27 years old, and his lifestyle of wine, women and song made him famous all over Scotland.

He was the son of a farmer, born in a cottage built by his father, in Alloway in Ayr. This cottage is now a museum, dedicated to Burns.

As a boy, he always loved stories of the supernatural, told to him by an old widow who sometimes helped out on his fathers’ farm and when Burns reached adulthood, he turned many of these stories into poems.

After the death of his father in 1784, Burns inherited the farm but by 1786 he was in terrible financial difficulties: the farm was not successful and he had made two women pregnant. Burns decided to emigrate to Jamaica so to raise the money required for this journey, he published his ‘Poems in the Scottish Dialect’ in 1786, which was an immediate success. He was persuaded not to leave Scotland by Dr Thomas Blacklock and in 1787 an Edinburgh edition of the poems was published.

He married Jean Armour in 1788 – she had been one of his many women during his early life. A very forgiving wife, she accepted and took responsibility for all Burns’ children, legitimate and illegitimate alike. His eldest child, the first of three illegitimate daughters all called Elizabeth, was greeted with the poem ‘Welcome to a Bastard Wean’.

A farm was bought, Ellisland, on the banks of the River Nith near Dumfries, but unfortunately the farm did not prosper and Burns ceased farming in 1791 and became a full-time exciseman.

A problem soon arose as the steady income from this employment gave him ample opportunity to continue with his hard drinking which had long been his weakness.

One of the most important literary tasks he began (a labour of love as he did not receive any payment for the work) was his songs for the Scots Musical Museum. Burns contributed over 300 songs, many of his own composition, and others based on older verses.

At this time he wrote, in just one day, his most famous long poem, ‘Tam O’Shanter’. ‘Tam O’Shanter’ is the story of a man who disturbs a coven of witches in the kirk at Alloway and has to flee for his life on Meg, his old grey mare. The fastest witch, Cutty Sark (cutty sark means short petticoat) nearly catches him by the River Doon, but the running water makes her powerless and though she manages to grasp Meg’s tail, Tam escapes over the bridge.

Burns died aged 37 of rheumatic fever which he contracted after falling asleep at the roadside (after a particularly vigorous drinking session) in pouring rain. The last of Burns’ children was actually born during his funeral service.

Burns will never be forgotten as his poems and songs are still as popular in Scotland as they were when first written.

Burns Night is a great occasion on January 25th when many dinners dedicated to his memory are held all over the world. The ritual of the Burns Supper was started by close friends of Robert Burns a few years after his death and the format remains largely unchanged today, beginning with the chairman of the Supper inviting the assembled company to welcome in the haggis . The poem ‘To a Haggis’ is recited and the haggis is then toasted with a glass of whisky . The evening ends with a rousing rendition of ‘Auld Lang Syne’ .

His spirit lives on!

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Each January, the life and works of the greatest of all Scottish poets, Rabbie Burns are celebrated. The words of the great man are read out aloud for all to appreciate, whilst little mention is made of William Topaz McGonagall - the bard of Dundee.

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Robert Burns summary

Robert Burns , (born Jan. 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scot.—died July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire), National poet of Scotland. The son of a poor farmer, he early became familiar with orally transmitted folk song and tales. His father’s farm failed, and a farm he started himself quickly went bankrupt. Handsome and high-spirited, he engaged in a series of love affairs, some of which produced children, and celebrated his lovers in his poems. His Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) brought acclaim but no financial security, and he eventually took a job as an exciseman. He later began collecting and editing hundreds of traditional airs for James Johnson’s Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803) and George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs (1793–1818); he substantially wrote many of these songs, though he did not claim them or receive payment for them. Among his best-known songs are “Auld Lang Syne,” “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” “John Anderson My Jo,” “A Red, Red Rose,” and “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonnie Doon.” He freely proclaimed his radical opinions, his sympathies with the common people, and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality.

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Who is Robert Burns, where was he born, when is Burns Night and why does Scotland celebrate him?

Since 1801, the birthday of Robert Burns has been remembered across Scotland and the entire the world, celebrating the Scottish poet's incredible legacy.

From his own unforgettable Scottish songs and poetry such as ' Auld Lang Syne ’ which people worldwide link arms and sing together every New Year, to inspiring the title of John Steinbeck's ' Of Mice and Men ' and even Michael Jackson, who was reportedly a fan of the writer which led to the creation of hit track ' Thriller '.

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And having come from a humble cottage in Alloway village, it would undoubtedly shock the poet to hear that since he first put pen to paper, a collection of his work has since orbited Earth 217 times or 'walking' 5.7 million miles.

So for those wondering when is Burns Night in 2024, who exactly was Robert Burns and why is he celebrated, here's everything you need to know.

Where was Robert Burns born?

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, South Ayrshire in 1759. While he was a pioneer of the 'Romantic' poetry era, Burns received very little formal education due to his intensive farm life.

Who was Robert Burns?

Robert Burns was born in 1759 as the eldest son of seven children of a farmer in the small village of Alloway . Although he followed his father’s career for much of his life he still managed to produce over 700 poems before his death.

Living a life of debt, Burns had empathy for the poor and understood the unfairness of that which meant he resonated profoundly with his fellow Scots. He frequently wrote about the gap between the rich and the poor, religion, love, alcohol and what it meant to be Scottish.

His identity as a Scot can be felt throughout all of his works based on his masterful and witty command of the Scots language like ‘Auld Lang Syne’ translating to ‘Old Long Since’.

What was Robert Burns' wife called?

Robert Burns had a reputation as a ladies' man, however his wife was Jean Armour . She was the mother of nine of his children, though he was known to have affairs outside of his marriage.

How old was Robert Burns when he died?

Robert Burns died aged 37 on July 21, 1796 in Dumfries. It is thought that excessive drinking was a leading cause behind the endocarditis that ended his life. Burns’ funeral tragically coincided with the birth of his son Maxwell.

What is Burns Night?

Every year in Scotland, Burns Night is celebrated to mark the birthday of the country’s national poet Robert Burns and it is considered our ‘other national day’ aside from St Andrew’s Day . On this day many Scots practise a number of cultural traditions to honour ‘Rabbie’ Burns himself and his legendary devotion to Scotland, including its natural beauty and inhabitants.

When was the first Burns Supper held?

It has been reported that the first Burns supper was held over 200 years ago in July 1801 when nine of the poet’s closest friends met up to mark the fifth anniversary of his death. This meal featured the traditional Scottish dish haggis and a Sheep’s head followed by a performance of Burns’ poem ‘ Address to a Haggis ’ and other song recitals.

When is Burns Night 2024?

Burns Night falls on January 25th every year to coincide with the poet's birthday on January 25th, 1759.

How is Burns Night celebrated?

Burns Night is traditionally commemorated in Scotland with a Burns Supper , a meal which starts with a cock-a-leekie soup followed by haggis, neeps and tatties and a glass of whisky , naturally.

There are many events that occur in places like Edinburgh which see revellers enjoying ceilidhs and poetry readings of Burns’ best works.

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• World Biography

Robert Burns Biography

Born: January 25, 1759 Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland Died: July 21, 1796 Dumfries, Scotland Scottish poet

Intense feeling and technical skill characterizes the work of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. His best work is in Scots, the language of southern Scotland. He is one of the greatest authors of that language in the last four centuries.

Early life and education

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, on January 25, 1759, to hard-working farmer parents. He began helping his father with farm work at the age of twelve. The difficulty of the labor later had a crippling effect on his health. Although Burns's formal schooling was limited, he loved to read and for a time he was tutored by John Murdoch, who thoroughly educated him in eighteenth-century English literature.

The family worked hard on the Ayrshire farm and at several others, but their lives were never made easier. Ongoing troubles with landlords and their agents fueled the rebellion that Burns felt against authority, which later became a major theme in his poetry. In 1784 his father died, and the family moved a few miles away to Mossgiel, Scotland. Here and in the nearby town of Mauchline, Scotland, the charming and attractive Burns began numerous love affairs, some of which extended to about 1790. (By the end of his short life he was to have fathered fourteen children by six different mothers.)

Achievement and sudden fame

While continuing to do farm work in Mossgiel, Burns began writing poetry, and his talents developed in a spectacular way. Many of his poems expressed his love of the country and its people and poked fun at his favorite target, followers of Calvinism (a religion that features a strict belief in God's absolute will over the affairs of humans). In 1786 he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at nearby Kilmarnock, Scotland, and the book was a success. At this time Burns was twenty-seven, and he had written some of the most effective and biting pieces of satire (ridicule or scorn) in the language. Among them were "Holy Willie's Prayer" (a dramatic speech that mocked a believer in Calvinism) and "The Holy Fair" (a humorous description of a Scottish religious camp meeting).

Other important poems that appeared in his first volume were "Address to the Unco Guid" (an appeal to the religious not to look down on sinners); "The Jolly Beggars" (a dramatic poem celebrating poor people); the masterful "Address to the Deil" (that is, to the Devil); "The Cotter's Saturday Night" (in praise of the Scottish countryside); and the moving "Auld Farmer's Salutation to His Mare" and "To a Mouse" (the latter a poem written to a field mouse who has been killed by a farmer while plowing). These and other poems by Burns are almost unequaled in their combination of accurate local language and depth of feeling. Not for centuries had such fine poetry been written in the Scots tongue.

But 1786 was also a year of great distress for Burns. His affair with Jean Armour had resulted in the birth of twins, and her parents refused to allow the couple to marry because of Burns's reputation as a critic of religion. In addition, Burns was in love with Mary Campbell, for whom he wrote the song "Highland Mary," but she died in 1786 as a result of giving birth to his child. Burns considered leaving the country for Jamaica, but he abandoned the plan and spent the winter in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was praised and honored for the success of his book. Early in 1787 a new edition of his poems was published that made him famous not only throughout Scotland but also in England and internationally. After a summer and fall spent touring Scotland (the only real traveling he ever did) and restarting his affair with Jean, Burns spent a second winter in Edinburgh. In March 1788 Burns returned to Mauchline and finally married Jean, who had given birth to a second set of his twins.

Later years and his songs

After his wedding Burns turned his efforts to supporting his family. In 1788 he leased a farm at Ellisland, Scotland, forty-five miles from Mauchline. After annoying delays in the building of his house and several rough years trying to make an income from his farmland, he moved with Jean and the children to Dumfries, Scotland. In 1789 he had begun working as a tax inspector, a profession in which he continued until his death. At Ellisland Burns had little free time, but it was there that he wrote his masterpiece of comic humor "Tam o'Shanter," his one outstanding piece of narrative verse.

Burns also wrote numerous songs (some of them original lyrics for old tunes, some reworkings of old lyrics) for The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of Scottish songs with which he had been associated since 1787. From 1792 until his death he also contributed to a similar work, A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. Most of Burns's poetic efforts in the Ellisland and Dumfries periods was in this area of song writing and song editing (he had written songs earlier but had usually not published them), and the results were very popular. Among the lyrics that he composed or reworked were "Mary Morison," "Highland Mary," "Duncan Gray," "Green Grow the Rashes, O," "Auld Lang Syne," "John Anderson, My Jo," "Scots Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled," "A Man's a Man for A' That," "A Red, Red Rose," and "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonie Doon." These are true song lyrics—that is, they are not poems meant to be set to music but rather are poems written to melodies that define the rhythm.

Burns's years in Dumfries were years of work and hardship, but contrary to reports written after his death, he was not shunned by others and he did not fall into moral decline. His fellow townsmen and his coworkers respected him. His health, which always caused him problems, began to fail, and he died of heart disease on July 21, 1796. His wife gave birth to their last child on the day of his funeral.

For More Information

Lindsay, Maurice. Robert Burns: The Man, His Work, The Legend. 2nd ed. London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.

McIntyre, Ian. Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

Sprott, Gavin. Robert Burns: Pride and Passion. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1996.

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Robert Burns

Robert burns’s life, robert burns’s works, robert burns’s style and popular poems, more about him, related posts:, post navigation.

Robert Burns Biography

Birthday: January 25 , 1759 ( Aquarius )

Born In: Ayrshire, Scotland

Robert Burns , famously known as the National Bard of Scotland , is the best-known Scottish language poet till date. Born into family of tenant farmers, he was mostly educated at home by his father. He started laboring at the farm at the age of twelve, which is said to have permanently damaged his health. Also famous for his amours as well as his rebellion against orthodox religion, he wrote his first poem, Handsome Nell, in the praise a farm girl at the age of fifteen. It was a spontaneous expression of his passion as until then he had no inclination to become a poet. However, he continued to write poems inspired by young ladies he met in the neighborhood and elsewhere. Later on, he started to write on other issues as well and eventually published, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect around the age of twenty-seven. Later, he stared contributing to other works such as Scots Musical Museum and A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, spending his last years in not only making original compositions, but also collecting folk songs from across Scotland.

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Also Known As: Rabbie Burns

Died At Age: 37

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

You wanted to know

When did robert burns write "auld lang syne".

Robert Burns wrote the poem "Auld Lang Syne" in 1788.

What is the significance of Robert Burns' work in Scottish literature?

Robert Burns is considered the national poet of Scotland and his work is integral to Scottish literature, as he wrote in the Scots language and celebrated Scottish culture.

Where is Robert Burns buried?

Robert Burns is buried in the Burns Mausoleum in Dumfries, Scotland.

What inspired Robert Burns to write his famous poem "To a Mouse?"

Robert Burns was inspired to write "To a Mouse" after accidentally plowing over a mouse's nest while working in the fields, leading to reflections on the nature of life and fate.

How did Robert Burns contribute to the preservation of Scottish folk songs?

Robert Burns collected and wrote down many Scottish folk songs, helping to preserve this important aspect of Scottish cultural heritage.

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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.

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' W inds 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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

Robert Burns had a pet mouse named 'Timothy' which he accidentally killed while plowing a field. He is said to have composed a poem in memory of the mouse.

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.

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When did Robert Burns die and what was his cause of death?

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January 25 marks Burns Night , a time when many people in Scotland and across the world celebrate the life of Robert Burns.

Burns was a Scottish lyricist and poet who lived in the 18th century and is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland.

He is best known for having written the traditional New Year’s Eve anthem Auld Lang Syne , and while his life was a short one, his work is still being celebrated to this day.

Burns Night now gives everyone a day to celebrate all things Scottish, including whisky, haggis , bagpiping, and Highland dancing.

But when and how did the poet die?

Robert Burns died at the young age of 37 on July 21, 1796 i n Dumfries, Scotland.

He was born into poverty on January 25, 1759 – which is what Burns Night commemorates – and went on to become a prolific writer of poems and songs, observing the struggles of the time using a Scottish vernacular that was under threat from being taken over by English.

There has been much speculation over how Robert Burns died, and due to lack of scientific evidence from the time, no one can be certain.

Many have pointed towards alcohol abuse as a contributing factor to his failing health and untimely death, although this too has been widely disputed

This has been a long-held belief first put forward by Dr James Currie, who was tasked with putting together an anthology of Burns’ work following his death.

However, Currie’s account of Burns’ death has been debated for years, with many believing he exaggerated Burns’ drinking habits due to his own dislike for the habit, as Currie himself was a recovering alcoholic.

It is also believed that Burns’ may have had an unknown rheumatic heart condition, that a heavy-drinking lifestyle could well have aggravated.

What is known is that he died in Dumfries in a two-storey red sandstone house on Mill Hole Brae, which is now known as Burns Street

His home is now a museum in his memory, and he was first laid to rest in Dumfries’ St. Michael’s Churchyard in Dumfries.

His body was eventually moved to its final location in the same cemetery to the Burns Mausoleum in September 1817. The body of his widow Jean Armour was buried with him in 1834. 

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Biography of Robert Burns

Born to a farming family in Scotland in 1759, Robert Burns is one of Scotland's most iconic poets to this day. Known both for his representations of his native country on the page and for his willingness to fight prevailing social norms, he is considered an early member of the Romantic movement.

Burns was the oldest son of a family living in rural Alloway, Scotland. His parents, William and Agnes, were tenant farmers, and though Burns was unable to receive much formal education, he was encouraged to read the works of writers like Shakespeare. But his family life wasn't easy. Burns himself found farm labor taxing and preferred writing. His father died in 1784, in ill health because of the physical, mental, and financial stress of his work and status. For Burns, the death of his father was a radicalizing moment, cementing a cynicism about the British class system that would be eloquently expressed in much of his poetry.

In 1786, Burns published the book Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which met unexpected popularity and marked him as a major practitioner of poetry in Scottish English. Following that success, Burns moved to the larger city of Edinburgh, where he published a volume of traditional Scottish music entitled The Scots Musical Museum. Burns left Edinburgh, first for a brief stint farming, during which he married his onetime lover Jean Amour. Soon after, they left the farm and settled in the town of Dumfries in 1791. There, Burns made his living as an excise officer and continued to write and compile Scottish folk verse. He published “Tam O’Shanter,” a longer narrative poem, in 1791, and contributed poetry to the publisher George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice.

Burns had a dramatic personal life as well as a successful writing career. In the early 1780s, prior to publishing his first book of poetry, he fathered children with two different women, including Jean Amour, though the two did not marry at the time. He also courted a young woman named Mary Campbell, whose sudden death ended their relationship. During his Edinburgh years, he had several love affairs, eventually having another child with a friend's servant, Jenny Clow. Though he and Jean Amour had nine children in total, only three lived past infancy. The poet's politics were as notable as his personal life. He never lost his strong convictions, which caused him to support the French Revolution in the final decade of his life. He died in 1796 at 37 years old.

Among Robert Burns's most famous poems and songs are “Auld Lang Syne,” “A Red, Red Rose," and " To a Mouse ." He joined a long line of Scottish poets writing in the unique dialect of Scotland, even as the English language became increasingly dominant. At the same time, his interest in folklore, as well as his emphasis on nature, emotion, and radical or revolutionary politics, all place him firmly in the nascent Romantic tradition. His use of Scottish language and lore, in fact, went hand-in-hand with his political beliefs: just as he advocated for the rights of those at the bottom of Britain's class system, he advocated against the hegemony of English culture and language, in both cases choosing the interests of the powerless over the powerful.

Study Guides on Works by Robert Burns

Ae fond kiss robert burns.

"Ae Fond Kiss" is a lyric poem written by Robert Burns in which a speaker addresses his lover on the occasion of their permanent parting. It was first published in the fourth volume of the series Scots Musical Museum, published by James Johnson,...

• Study Guide

Robert Burns: Poems Robert Burns

Poems —the full title being Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect —is the primary reason you are familiar with his verse or vaguely recognize the name if you are not. A term that gets tossed around with great frequency is “books the changed the...

To a Mouse Robert Burns

To a Mouse is a poem written by Scottish poet Robert Burns, published in 1785.

The poem describes the speaker’s regret at accidentally destroying a mouse’s nest. The speaker is forced to think about many others in a similar situation, in which...

• Lesson Plan