Burns, Robert (1759–96). Poet, son of an Ayrshire tenant farmer. Well educated by an enlightened parish schoolmaster, Burns grew up with an appetite for literature which constantly jostled with his love of the vernacular culture of his region and country. His first creative period coincided with his father's death in 1784, his own unsuccessful attempts at farming, and a passionate affair with Jean Armour. It culminated in the publication of the so-called Kilmarnock edition of his Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786). This carefully crafted selection of poems, which was designed to show that Scots could be used as a vehicle of polite literature, was a literary sensation and marks the beginning of a Burns cult that has survived and prospered until the present day. It earned Burns the quite unwarranted reputation for being an untaught natural genius and quickly established him as Scotland's national bard, the man whose loyalties to the refined polite conventions of the English neo-classical literary tradition and to the simplicities of vernacular verse seemed to typify the cultural dilemmas of educated and ambitious post-Union Scots. Being lionized in Edinburgh proved an unnerving and complicated experience for Burns, who was on the point of emigrating to Jamaica when marriage, the offer of a farm, and an appointment in the excise in 1789 made him decide to stay in Scotland. The second creative period of his career was marked by his contributions to James Johnson's The Scots Musical Museum (1789–1803). These took the form of more than 100 brilliantly and delicately reworked vernacular songs and lyrics which some modern critics think are the ultimate vindication of his claim that he had transformed the literary potential of Scots and, indeed, of vernacular literature generally. He died in poverty in Dumfries in 1796 at the age of 37.

Nicholas Phillipson