A
Quick Overview
He was born Jan. 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland and died. July 21, 1796, at Dumfries, Dumfriesshire. Robert Burns is the 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.
Comments: A brillian author facinated with the complex relationships between men and women. There is a strong michious side in all he writes so that one is never sure how serious to think of him.
His
Life
Links
His
Works (Some!)
Links
Robert Burns - A Celebration - A website--with a decidedly Scottish accent--devoted to Burns and his writings, including a thorough biography and literary history, essays and commentary on Burns, and links to further resources on the internet. Also special because it has sound files of different poems.
Robert Burns Tribute - Burns Supper, Haggis, Poems, Robert Burns Contests and more - "This Robert Burns tribute site gives you the complete guide to Robert Burns the man, his poems, haggis
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 nave and sentimental moralizing.Edinburgh unsettled Burns, and, after a number of amorous and
other adventures there and several trips to other parts of Scotland,
he settled in the summer of 1788 at a farm in Ellisland,
Dumfriesshire. At Edinburgh, too, he arranged for a new and
enlarged edition (1787) of his Poems, but little of significance was
added to the Kilmarnock selection. He found farming at Ellisland
difficult, though he was helped by Jean Armour, with whom he had
been reconciled and whom he finally married in 1788.In Edinburgh Burns had met James Johnson, a keen collector of
Scottish songs who was bringing out a series of volumes of songs
with the music and who enlisted Burns's help in finding, editing,
improving, and rewriting items. Burns was enthusiastic and soon
became virtual editor of Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum.
Later, he became involved with a similar project for George
Thomson, but Thomson was a more consciously genteel person than
Johnson, and Burns had to fight with him to prevent him from
"refining" words and music and so ruining their character. Johnson's
The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803) and the first five volumes
of Thomson's A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs for the
Voice (1793-1818) contain the bulk of Burns's songs. Burns spent
the latter part of his life in assiduously collecting and writing songs to
provide words for traditional Scottish airs. He regarded his work as
service to Scotland and quixotically refused payment. The only
poem he wrote after his Edinburgh visit that showed a hitherto
unsuspected side of his poetic genius was Tam o'Shanter (1791), a
spirited, narrative poem in brilliantly handled eight-syllable couplets
based on a folk legend.Meanwhile, Burns corresponded with and visited on terms of
equality a great variety of literary and other people who were
considerably "above" him socially. He was an admirable letter writer
and a brilliant talker, and he could hold his own in any company. At
the same time, he was still a struggling tenant farmer, and the attempt
to keep himself going in two different social and intellectual
capacities was wearing him down. After trying for a long time, he
finally obtained a post in the excise service in 1789 and moved to
Dumfries in 1791, where he lived until his death. His life at Dumfries
was active. He wrote numerous "occasional" poems and did an
immense amount of work for the two song collections, in addition to
carrying out his duties as exciseman. The outbreak of the French
Revolution excited him, and some indiscreet outbursts nearly lost
him his job, but his reputation as a good exciseman and a politic but
humiliating recantation saved him.
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 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."
(D.Da.)
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.
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.
"Burns, Robert" Encyclopædia Britannica Online.
<http://search.eb.com/bol/topic
[Accessed November 8 1999].
