BURNS, Robert

BURNS, Robert [1759–96].Scottish national poet, born in Alloway, Ayrshire, and educated by a tutor, by his father at home, and by his own wide reading. His childhood and youth were spent helping his father in unsuccessful farming ventures. His first volume of poems, the Kilmarnock Edition of 1786, aroused great enthusiasm and he was fêted in Edinburgh social circles. He had friends and patrons of high rank, despite his radical views, but it was not until 1789 that he obtained in Dumfries the excise appointment he sought, and not until 1791 that he gave up farming to become a full-time exciseman. In his earliest poems, Burns hesitates between SCOTS and ENGLISH, but the influence of Robert Fergusson confirmed his preference for Scots. Widely considered the supreme poet in that tongue, Burns draws on the registers of folk-song, storytelling, preaching, social banter, and daily work, as well as the Bible and Augustan English poetry, and is noted for his ability to modulate between English and Scots for subtle effects:But pleasures are like poppies spread;
You seize the flow'r, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white—then melts for ever;
Or like the Borealis race,
That flit ere you can point their place;
Or like the rainbow's lovely form
Evanishing amid the storm.
Nae man can tether time or tide;
The hour approaches Tam maun ride;
That hour, o' night's black arch the key-stane,
And sic a night he taks the road in,
As ne'er poor sinner was abroad in.
(from Tam o'Shanter, 1791)


The main achievement of his later years was a body of Scots songs, some 250 of them partly or wholly his own, contributed to the collections of James Johnson (six volumes, 1787–1803) and George Thomson (five volumes, 1793–1818).