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Robert Burns

The first of seven children, Robert Burns, the national poet of Scotland, was born in Alloway on January 25, 1759. His father, William, was employed as a gardener until 1766 when he became a tenant farmer at Mount Oliphant, near Alloway, moving to Lochlie farm, Tarbolton, eleven years later. A series of bad harvests and the demands of the landlord's estate manager bankrupted the family, and William died almost penniless in 1784. These events had a profound effect on Robert, leaving him with an antipathy towards political authority and a hatred of the land-owning classes.

With the death of his father, Robert became head of the family and they moved again, this time to a farm at Mossgiel, near Mauchline. Burns had already begun writing poetry and prose at Lochlie, recording incidental thoughts in his First Commonplace Book, but it was here at Mossgiel that he began to write in earnest, and his first volume, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, was published in Kilmarnock in 1786. The book proved immensely popular, celebrated by ordinary Scots and Edinburgh literati alike, with the satirical trilogy Holy Willie's Prayer, The Holy Fair and Address to the Devil attracting particular attention. The object of Burns' poetic scorn was the kirk, whose ministers had obliged him to appear in church to be publicly condemned for fornication - a commonplace punishment in those days.

Burns spent the winter of 1786-87 in the capital, lionized by the literary establishment. Despite his success, however, he felt trapped, unable to make enough money from writing to leave farming. He was also in a political snare, fraternizing with the elite, but with radical views and pseudo-Jacobite nationalism that constantly landed him in trouble. His frequent recourse was to play the part of the unlettered ploughman-poet, the noble savage who might be excused his impetuous outbursts and hectic womanizing.

He had, however, made useful contacts in Edinburgh and as a consequence was recruited to collect, write and rearrange two volumes of songs set to traditional Scottish tunes. These volumes, James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum and George Thomson's Select Scottish Airs, contain the bulk of his songwriting, and it's on them that Burns' international reputation rests, with works like Auld Lang Syne, Scots, Wha Hae, Coming Through the Rye and Green Grow the Rushes, O. At this time, too, though poetry now took second place, he produced two excellent poems: Tam o' Shanter and a republican tract, A Man's a Man for a' That.

Burns often boasted of his sexual conquests, and he fathered several illegitimate children, but in 1788, he eventually married Jean Armour, a stonemason's daughter from Mauchline, with whom he already had two children, and moved to Ellisland Farm, near Dumfries. The following year, he was appointed excise officer and could at last leave farming, moving to Dumfries in 1791. Burns'years of comfort were short-lived, however. His years of labour on the farm, allied to a rheumatic fever, damaged his heart, and he died in Dumfries on July 21, 1796, aged 37.Burns' work, inspired by a romantic nationalism and tinged with a wry wit, has made him a potent symbol of "Scottishness". Ignoring the anglophile preferences of the Edinburgh elite, he wrote in Scots vernacular about the country he loved, an exuberant celebration that filled a need in a nation culturally colonized by England. Today, Burns Clubs all over the world mark every anniversary of the poet's birthday with the Burns' Supper, complete with Scottish totems - haggis, piper and whisky bottle - and a ritual recital of Burns' Ode to a Haggis.

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