Robert Burns
1759–1796
Biography
Robert Burns (1759–1796), whom many Scots call Rabbie, was a Scottish poet and song writer, and he is the writer the country most often claims as its national poet. He was born at Alloway in Ayrshire, the eldest child of a tenant farmer, and grew up in hard work and poverty on a series of farms. He learned from a teacher in the parish and read whatever he could get hold of. Most of his poems are in the Scots language, though he also wrote in standard English, and his work is marked by humour, sympathy for ordinary people and a blunt attitude towards religious hypocrisy and social rank.
His first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was printed at Kilmarnock in 1786 on a subscription and made his name. It included 'The Twa Dogs', 'To a Mouse' and 'The Cotter's Saturday Night'. He was welcomed in Edinburgh that winter, and an enlarged edition followed there in 1787. He then took an excise post, leased a farm near Dumfries, and in 1791 moved into Dumfries itself, where he spent his last years. He collected old Scottish songs for publication, often revising them and writing new verses to fit traditional tunes.
His best-known works include 'Auld Lang Syne', 'A Red, Red Rose', 'Tam o' Shanter' and 'Scots Wha Hae', which for a long time served as an unofficial Scottish anthem. He died at Dumfries on 21 July 1796, aged 37. Later writers saw him as a forerunner of Romantic poetry, and Wordsworth, who visited his grave in 1803, wrote a poem there. Burns Suppers on his birthday and the singing of 'Auld Lang Syne' at New Year keep his name alive. The book on this site, Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, gives readers his poems and songs in one volume.
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Books
Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
by Robert Burns
The poems and songs of Scotland's national poet, arranged year by year from his boyhood verses in 1771 to his death in 1796. The Scots words are kept as he wrote them, and the notes gloss the hard ones. This book uses the racial and other slurs of its period as written; the Book…
Summary written by Claude Sonnet 5.5.