Robert Burns
Robert Burns is Scotland's national poet, whose songs are sung worldwide by people who could not name their author. Born in Alloway in Ayrshire in 1759, the eldest of seven children of a struggling tenant farmer, he did heavy field labour from boyhood, which permanently damaged his health, while being unusually well educated by a tutor his father engaged. Farming failed repeatedly. In 1786, in debt and facing the consequences of Jean Armour's pregnancy, he planned to emigrate to Jamaica to work on a plantation and published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at Kilmarnock to raise the fare. It sold out, made him famous within months, and he went to Edinburgh instead — where literary society received him as a heaven-taught ploughman, a persona he played and privately resented. He wrote in Scots at a moment when educated Scotland was trying to eliminate it, which is much of his significance. Tam o' Shanter, Holy Willie's Prayer, To a Mouse and A Man's a Man for A' That combine vernacular comedy with egalitarian politics; he sympathised openly with the American and French revolutions, which was dangerous for a government employee. From 1787 he collected, repaired and wrote hundreds of songs for The Scots Musical Museum and a later collection, refusing payment for them. Auld Lang Syne and Ae Fond Kiss come from that work, which preserved a body of folk material that was disappearing. He took a post as an exciseman in Dumfries in 1789 to survive. He fathered at least twelve children by four women, and died in 1796 aged thirty-seven of rheumatic heart disease. Burns Night is observed on his birthday, 25 January.
- Lived: 1759 CE – 1796 CE
- Nationality: British
- Roles: poet
