Burns, Robert

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.

Robert Burns, detail of an oil painting by Alexander Nasmyth; in the National Portrait Gallery, ...

Courtesy of The National Portrait Gallery, London

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▪ Scottish poet

Introduction

born Jan. 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scot.

died July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire

 national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in the Scottish dialect of English. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality.

Life

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

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

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

      Though he wrote poetry for his own amusement and that of his friends, Burns remained restless and dissatisfied. He won the reputation of being a dangerous rebel against orthodox religion, and, when in 1786 he fell in love with Jean Armour, her father refused to allow her to marry Burns even though a child was on the way and under Scots law mutual consent followed by consummation constituted a legal marriage. Jean was persuaded by her father to go back on her promise; Robert, hurt and enraged, took up with another girl, Mary Campbell, who died soon after; on September 3 Jean bore him twins out of wedlock. Meanwhile, the farm was not prospering, and Burns, harassed by insoluble problems, thought of emigrating. But he first wanted to show his country what he could do. In the midst of his troubles he went ahead with his plans for publishing a volume of his poems at the nearby town of Kilmarnock. It was entitled Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and appeared on July 31, 1786. Its success was immediate and overwhelming. Simple country folk and sophisticated Edinburgh critics alike hailed it, and the upshot was that Burns set out for Edinburgh on Nov. 27, 1786, to be lionized, patronized, and showered with well-meant but dangerous advice.

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

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

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

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

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

Assessment

      Burns was a man of great intellectual energy and force of character who, in a class-ridden society, never found an environment in which he could fully exercise his personality. The fact is that Scottish culture in his day could provide no intellectual background that might replace the Calvinism that Burns rejected. The Edinburgh literati of Burns's day were second raters, but the problem was more than one of personalities. The only substitute for the rejected Calvinism seemed to be a sentimental deism, a facile belief in the good heart as all, and this was not a creed rich or complex enough to nourish great poetry. That Burns in spite of this produced so much fine poetry shows the strength of his unique genius, and that he has become the Scottish national poet is a tribute to his hold on the popular imagination.

      Burns perhaps exhibited his greatest poetic powers in his satires. There is also a remarkable craftsmanship in his verse letters, which display a most adroit counterpointing of the colloquial and the formal. But it is by his songs that Burns is best known, and it is his songs that have carried his reputation round the world. Burns is without doubt the greatest songwriter Great Britain has produced.

      Burns wrote all his songs (folk music) to known tunes, sometimes writing several sets of words to the same air in an endeavour to find the most apt poem for a given melody. Many songs which, it is clear from a variety of evidence, must have been substantially written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne,” for example, which he described simply as an old fragment he had discovered, but the song we have is almost certainly his, though the chorus and probably the first stanza are old. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is not the tune to which it is now sung, as Thomson set it to another tune.) The full extent of Burns's work on Scottish song will probably never be known.

      It is positively miraculous that Burns was able to enter into the spirit of older folk song and re-create, out of an old chorus, such songs as “I'm O'er Young to Marry Yet,” “Green Grow the Rashes, O,” and a host of others. It is this uncanny ability to speak with the great anonymous voice of the Scottish people that explains the special feeling that Burns arouses, feelings that manifest themselves in the “Burns cult.”

David Daiches

Major Works

Burns's first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), known as the Kilmarnock edition, contains 44 of Burns's best known poems. The Edinburgh edition (1787) adds 22 poems, including “Address to the Unco Guid, or the Rigidly Righteous” and “The Brigs of Ayr.” The last version to be supervised by Burns, 2nd ed., 2 vol. (1793), adds another 18, including “Tam o' Shanter.” James Johnson, Robert Burns, and Stephen Clarke, The Scots Musical Museum, 6 vol. (1787–1803), includes some 200 songs and fragments, with some airs, written, revised, or collected by Burns. More than 70 of Burns's songs are included in the first five vol. of George Thomson (compiler), A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the Voice (1793–1818).James Kinsley (ed.), The Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, 3 vol. (1968), also available in an abridged ed., Poems and Songs (1969, reprinted 1979), is the standard modern scholarly edition. Donald A. Low (ed.), The Songs of Robert Burns (1993), contains the most complete edition of the songs with the music.

Additional Reading

The standard edition of Burns's letters is J. De Lancey Ferguson (ed.), The Letters of Robert Burns, 2nd ed., edited by G. Ross Roy, 2 vol. (1985).The fullest modern biography is James Mackay, RB: A Biography of Robert Burns (also published as A Biography of Robert Burns, 1992). J. De Lancey Ferguson, Pride and Passion: Robert Burns, 1759–1796 (1939, reissued 1964), offers an admirable portrait of Burns the man. David Daiches, Robert Burns (1950, reissued as Robert Burns: The Poet, 1994), gives a full account of both the man and the poetry. Thomas Crawford, Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs (1960, reissued 1994), is a critical and scholarly study. Gavin Sprott, Robert Burns: Pride and Passion (1996), provides a perceptive account of the poet's life and environment.

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