The Life and Works of Robert Burns
Celebrate the Memory of the Famous Scottish Poet on Burn’s Night
Dec 1, 2008
Much of Robert Burns's poetry reflects the poet's rustic upbringing and the hardships he encountered in 18th century rural Scotland.
Burns’s Working Life
Born on 25 January 1759, Robert Burns was one of seven children born to a cotter (tenant farmer) near Alloway in Ayrshire. Burns was fully employed on the struggling farm as a ploughman. Burns’s early experience of poverty and injustice as a youth no doubt increased his belief in the equality of men. This led Burns to becoming an early supporter of the French Revolution.
In 1784, after the death of their father, Burns and his brother continued to farm, now at Mossgiel.
In 1788 Burns married Jean Armour and settled on a poor farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries. In 1789 he secured a post as an Excise Officer, and in 1791 relinquished his farming life and moved to Dumfries.
Responding to the threat of French invasion, Burn joined the Dumfries Volunteers in 1795.
Robert Burns died at the age of 37 of rheumatic heart disease in July 1796.
Burns’s Literary Life
During his tenure at Mossgiel Burns produced his early poems, which included ‘The Cotter’s Saturday Night’, ‘To a Mouse’, ‘To a Mountain Daisy’, ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, the Epistles to Labraik and ‘The Holy Fair’.
1786 saw the publication of Burns’s Kilmarnock edition of ‘Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect’, which was an immediate success. Burns found himself praised by the literary and aristocratic society of Edinburgh, who encouraged Burns to write in the rhetorical and sentimental fashion of the day. In this mode Burns wrote ‘The Lament’, ‘Despondency’ and ‘Address to Edinburgh’, but his own characteristic voice was not subdued. Burns wrote and co-edited over 200 songs for the ‘Scots Musical Museum’. This was an important series of volumes of Scottish songs collected from the period 1787-1803. Burns made many notable contributions, including several of his best-known lyrics: ‘O my luve’s like a red, red rose’, ‘Ye Banks and Braes’, ‘Scots wha hae’ and ‘Auld Lang Syne’.
Burns and ‘Auld Lang Syne’
Burns contributed the lyrics for ‘Auld Lang Syne’ to the fifth volume of the ‘Scots Musical Museum’. However, it was not entirely composed by Burns. The refrain had long been in print, and the first line and title appeared in a poem by Allan Ramsey, a Scottish poet and bookseller who had died in 1758.
‘Tam O’Shanter’ and Burns’s Literary Legacy
Burns published his last major poem ‘Tam O’Shanter’ in 1791. This poem is a magnificent and warmly humorous account of Tam’s encounter with a den of witches, in which the objectivity of the narrative is called into question by Tam’s drunkenness.
Today, Burns’s position as the greatest rustic poet in the Scottish literary tradition is celebrated by the annual festival of Burn’s Night, held on his birthday, 25 January, throughout Scotland and beyond.
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