Scottish Authors > Robert Burns Poet 1759-1796

Burns was born at Alloway near Ayr on 25th January 1759, the eldest of a family of seven born to William and Agnes Burnes. The Burnes family hailed from Kincardineshire, but William had moved south in the aftermath of the Jacobite rebellion, first to Edinburgh and then to Ayrshire where he was employed as a landscape gardener. In 1757 he married Agnes Brown whose family had lived in the Kirkoswald and Maybole district for generations.

The future poet's earliest years were spent in the "auld cley biggin", the cottage which William Burnes had erected on a portion of the land which he had feued as a market garden, and it was here that he and his brother Gilbert received their brief formal education at the hands of John Murdoch. In 1765 the family moved to Mount Oliphant, a 70-acre farm two miles away. It was here, in the autumn of 1774, that Burns wrote his first song Handsome Nell as a tribute to the girl with whom he was partnered at harvest-time. With the exception of the Tragic fragment (in blank verse), all of Burns's early compositions were lyrics set to well-known melodies of the period, and song writing was to be his principal metier till the end of his life.

At Whitsun 1777 the Burnes family moved to Lochlie, a hill farm of 130 acres in Tarbolton parish. Three years later Burns took a leading part in founding the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, a convivial debating society widely regarded as the prototype for the many Burns clubs now flourishing world-wide. In 1780 he was inducted into the local masonic lodge; freemasonry was to be a major influence on his life, and helped launch his literary career.

William Burnes died in February 1784, broken by prolonged litigation over the lease of Lochlie. The following month Robert and Gilbert decided to alter the spelling of their surname, and about that time took the lease of Mossgiel farm near Mauchline. The death of William Burnes had a liberating influence on Robert; 1784 was his annus mirabilis and a great deal of the poetry which would appear in his first edition was composed in this brief period.

He was liberated in other ways also, with unfortunate results. In 1785 Elizabeth Paton, a farm-servant, gave birth to a daughter. Characteristically Burns celebrated the event in verses which he pithily entitled A Poet's welcome to a bastart wean. By now Rab Mossgiel was acquiring a reputation (in two or three parishes) as a versifier and wit. An affair with Iean Armour, a master-mason's daughter, had inevitable results. Hounded by the girl's father, Burns had a brief affair with a byrewoman at Coilsfield, Margaret 'Highland Mary' Campbell, which ended tragically with her death from typhoid fever which may have been exacerbated by pregnancy.

Deciding to emigrate to Jamaica, Burns cast about for some way of raising the GBP 20.00 to pay his fare, and decided to publish his poems. Poems, chiefly in the Scottish dialect appeared at Kilmarnock in July 1786 in a modest edition of 612 copies at three shillings, and netted the poet about GBP 54.00. Encouraged by favourable acclaim from the Revd Dr Thomas Blacklock, one of the Edinburgh literati, Burns abandoned his plans to emigrate. In November he set out for Edinburgh in the hope of securing a second and much larger edition. Published in April 1787, this yielded about GBP 1100, part of which Burns used to pay his brother's debts and part to take the lease of Ellisland farm in Nithsdale,which he occupied 1788-91.

At the same time, he sought a career offering a regular income and in 1789 entered the Excise service. In 1791 he abandoned farming and settled in Dumfries where he died in July 1796.

Burns's reputation as a poet rests largely on the Kilmarnock Edition of 1786 although his great comic masterpiece Tam o' Shanter was written in 1790. From 1787 onwards, however, Burns tended to concentrate on songs, collecting and mending the ancient ballads of Scotland, writing new verses in many cases. His importance as a folklorist and song-collector has only really been appreciated in relatively recent years, thanks to the scholarship of Professor Low and others. Many of Burns's songs were sanitised revisions of traditional bawdry, but he made a collection of the originals and composed quite a few bawdy ballads of his own; this manuscript collection,was published anonymously after his death under the title of The Merry muses of Caledonia but it is only since 1968 that Burns's own contribution has been segregated and added to the canon.

As a poet, he was extremely versatile, handling many different metres and verse forms with consummate skill, equally at home in the verse epistle and the epigram, the sonnet and the longer satirical work. In contrast with his nature poems are the ballads savaging the hypocrisies of the Kirk and the radical songs of the 1790s. Few were published in his lifetime, but they would become the medium for extending his reputation world-wide, especially in the present century.

In addition to the 650-odd poems and songs, Burns was a voluminous letter-writer. Here again, the range of subject and treatment is wide, from the social letters to the polemics, sometimes mannered but always written with vigour, studded with colourful metaphors and containing numerous quotations and literary allusions that reveal the scope and extent of his voracious reading. Burns also had ambitions to write for the stage, but his early death left his ambition unresolved, and his only work of dramatic merit is The Jolly beggars, a cantata of love and liberty.

The myths of drunkenness and dissipation which grew up in the years following his death were grossly exaggerated. For the record, Burns had two sets of twins by Iean Armour before he acknowledged her formally as his wife, and five other children, the last (Maxwell Burns) being born on the day of the poet's funeral. Four other children were born out of wedlock.

In his lifetime editions of his poetry were published in Ireland and the USA and his work circulated widely in Europe, with translations into French and German from the 1820s, which had immense influence on the Romantic poets and composers. Two centuries after the Kilmarnock Edition, over 2000 editions of Burns have been published, with translations into 50 languages. Today Burns is ranked among the leading world poets of all time.

James Mackay

Search Scotland's Culture for more by & about this author. Link will open in a new window.