Achievements
Robert Burns’s most significant poetry was written in what may loosely be termed Scots—the northern dialect of English spoken regularly by Scottish peasants and informally by Scottish gentry. When the poet attempted to write in standard eighteenth century British English, he came forth as a different person: stiff, conventional, and genteel, seemingly trying too hard to find his place within the poetic tradition of his day. No matter what the dialect, however, literary historians have termed Burns a “pre-Romantic,” a poet who anticipated William Wordsworth, gave new life to the English lyric, relied heavily upon literary forms and legends peculiar to the Scottish folk culture, and (certainly the most Wordsworthian quality of them all) wrote in the actual language of the common people. Few realize, however, that the pre-Romantic label is based primarily on Burns’s songs, while the bulk of his poetry was written in the forms favored by the majority of eighteenth century poets. He also wrote satire, verse epistles to friends and fellow poets, and even a variation on the mock-epic narrative (“Tam O’Shanter”). An argument could easily be advanced that Burns ranks as a first-rate practitioner of those forms.
Nevertheless, as a writer of satire, epistle, and mock-heroic, Burns does not belong entirely to the neoclassical mainstream which followed John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and Oliver Goldsmith. With his dialect and intricate stanza forms, his poems evinced a heartiness and exuberance, and even a certain “roughness.” Burns had little use for Horace, Homer, and the other models for English neoclassicism; instead, he turned to a clearer tradition that had been established during the so-called golden age of Scottish poetry by the major Scottish Chaucerians: Robert Henryson (1430-1506), William Dunbar (c. 1460-c. 1525), and Gavin Douglas (c. 1474-1522). Following the efforts of Allan Ramsay (1686-1758) and Robert Fergusson (1750-1774)—earlier Scottish poets who had collected the ancient poems and had written new ones based on the older models—Burns committed himself to the bards and songs of his native land. He refined the work of his eighteenth century predecessors, but he was also perceptive enough to learn from them and to retain characteristic subjects, forms, stanza patterns, and language.
No matter how academic, the discussion of Burns’s poetry seems never to circumvent his songs. Almost to a line, those short pieces have gained wider fame and prompted more discussion than have his longer poems. Burns wrote more than three hundred songs on every subject imaginable within the context of late eighteenth century Scotland. Within the confines of those songs, Burns gave himself almost totally to the emotions of the moment; he reached out, touched the essence of rural Scotland, and brought it lyrically to life. He gave his readers the excitement and the genuineness of love, work, friendship, patriotism, and even inebriation (a point that has been greatly overemphasized). He portrayed universal character types, national heroes as well as lowly tavern revelers, and he took delight in sketching the grand parades of humanity as they passed before his vivid and lyrical imagination. Thus, Burns’s poetic achievement was really very simple. He assumed the mantle of Scotland’s national poet at a time when the country was struggling to preserve its cultural identity. However, if Burns spoke for Scotland, he stood also for all English-speaking people, who, as they prepared to undergo the political and technological traumas of the nineteenth century, needed frequent reminders of their national, political, and artistic heritage.
Biography
Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759, in Alloway, some three miles south of the seaport town of Ayr. He was the first son of William Burnes (the original spelling of the family name that the poet eventually altered) and Agnes Broun. The father belonged to a lowly class of Scots agricultural society: He was a cotter, one who occupied a cottage on a farm in exchange for labor. As such, he engaged in a constant struggle to keep himself, his illiterate wife, and their seven children fed and clothed. In 1766, the elder Burnes leased seventy acres near Ayr and committed his family to farming. High rents and poor soil, however, only increased the size of the family debt.
Young Robert studied at a small village school, where, for three years, he read English literature, wrote essays, and learned mathematics. After the practicalities of elementary education had been mastered, further learning came only as time would permit. The local schoolmaster, John Murdock, managed to teach the boy some French, and in 1775, the sixteen-year-old Burns journeyed across the Doon River to Kirkoswald, where he studied the rudiments of surveying. At home, the senior Burnes assumed responsibility for the balance of his son’s education: geography, history, devotional and theological literature, and more mathematics. Although chores related to the family farm assumed a high priority, young Burns managed to find time for the Bible, Presbyterian theology, and any books he could beg or borrow from friends and neighbors.
In 1777, William Burnes moved his family some twelve miles to the northwest, to Lochlie Farm, between Tarbolton and Mauchline. There, eighteen-year-old Robert emerged as a sociable, sensitive, and handsome young man. He debated in the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, a group of serious albeit boisterous young men; he joined the Freemasons; and he discovered women. In 1781, he attempted to embark upon a business career in the flax-dressing industry at Irvine, on the coast. The venture proved to be a failure, and for the most part Burns rooted himself to the family farm in central Ayrshire, where he remained until the publication of the Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. William Burnes died in 1784, leaving his family heavily in debt. Robert and his brother Gilbert remained on the farm, however, and the poet’s early verse indicates the degree to which he involved himself in the activities, associations, and gossip of the local people.
Burns had begun to write poetry around 1773, when he was fourteen. The poems tended, primarily, to be song lyrics in the Scots vernacular, although (probably as a result of Murdock’s influence) he tried his hand at some moral and sentimental pieces in standard English. The manuscripts of those poems reveal considerable roughness. Burns needed models, and not until he came upon the work of two Scots poets, Robert Fergusson and Allan Ramsay, did he learn how to write nonlyrical poetry in the Scots vernacular that would appeal to the hearts and minds of his countrymen. Three years prior to the publication of the Kilmarnock edition, he put together a commonplace book (several versions of which have been published), containing both his poems and remarks concerning his poetic development. Thus, the period 1785-1786 marked Burns’s most significant literary output. It also proved to be the time when he would have to pay dearly for liaisons with various young women of the area. In May, 1785, his first daughter was born to Elizabeth Paton, a former servant; in all, he fathered nine illegitimate children, four by his future wife, Jean Armour (those were two sets of twins). He accepted responsibility for rearing and supporting all of them. Another affair with a servant girl, Mary Campbell—the “Highland Mary” of the song—ended tragically when the girl died giving birth to another Burns child.
Despite these domestic problems, the Kilmarnock edition of poems was published, bringing Burns success and some money. More important, the volume took him out of Ayrshire and into Edinburgh, where he gained the praise of the critic Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831) and the publisher William Creech (1745-1815), and where he arranged for publication and subscriptions for a new edition of his poems. From November, 1786, to mid-1788, Burns lived in Edinburgh, seeking to establish himself in its social and intellectual atmosphere. Although his congenial personality and intellectual curiosity appealed to the upper levels of Edinburgh society, they were not enough to erase the stigma of low social birth. The upper classes ultimately rejected him. Thus, the young poet drifted to the late-hour social clubs frequented by printers, booksellers, clerks, and schoolmasters. Through it all, he pondered about how to earn a living, since neither poetry nor social contacts enabled him to meet his financial obligations. Four separate tours throughout Scotland and the editorship of James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum yielded no relief from financial pressures.
In March, 1788, Burns rented a tract of land for farming in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire, after which he finally married Jean Armour. He then began a struggle to support his family, a contest that was not eased even upon his securing an appointment (September, 1789) as tax collector and moving to Dumfries. His literary activities were limited to collecting and writing songs, in addition to the composition of some nonlyric pieces of moderate quality. Although “Tam O’Shanter” belongs to this period, Burns misused his talents by trying to emulate the early eighteenth century poets—composing moral epistles, general verse satires, political ballads, serious elegies, and prologues for theatrical pieces.
Burns died on July 21, 1796, the result of a heart condition that had existed since his youth. The details of his life have been much overstated, particularly the gossip about his drinking and his excessive sexual appetite. For serious students of his poetry, Burns’s autobiography can be found within the sound and the sense of his writing.
Analysis
To an extraordinary degree, Robert Burns is the poet of Scotland, a Scotland that—despite its union with England—remained for him and his readers a totally independent cultural, intellectual, social, and political entity. Undoubtedly, Burns will always be identified exclusively with Scotland, with its peculiar life and manners communicated to the outside world through its distinctive dialect and fierce national pride. He justly deserves that identification, for he not only wrote about Scottish life and manners but also sought his inspiration from Scotland—from his own Ayrshire neighborhood, from its land and its people.
Influence of Scotland
Scotland virtually drips from the lines of Burns’s poetry. The scenes of the jocular “Jolly Beggars” have their source in Poosie Nansie’s inn at Mauchline, while the poet and Tam O’Shanter meet the witches and the warlocks at midnight on the very real, local, and familiar Alloway Kirk. Indeed, reality obscures even the boldest attempts at erudite romanticism. Burns alludes to actual persons, to friends and acquaintances whom he knew and loved and to whom he dedicated his songs. When he tried his hand at satire, he focused upon local citizens, identifying specific personages or settling for allusions that his eighteenth century Scottish readers would easily recognize. In “The Cotter’s Saturday Night”—which features a clear portrait of his own father—the poet reflects his deep attachment to and sincere pride in the village of Alloway and the rural environment of Ayrshire. He viewed the simple scenes in “The Cotter’s Saturday Night” as the real essence of Scotland’s heritage. Burns began with a sincere love and respect for his neighbors, and he sustained that attitude throughout his life and his work. Without the commitment to Scotland, he never would have conquered the hearts of its native readers or risen to become the acknowledged national poet of the land north of the Tweed.
Burns’s poetry gained almost immediate success among all classes of the Scottish population. He knew of what he wrote, and he grasped almost immediately the living tradition of Scottish poetry, assimilating the qualities of that tradition into his own verse forms and distinct subject matter. For example, the stanzaic forms in such poems as “To a Mouse” (and its companions) had been in existence for more than three hundred years. Burns early had become familiar with the Scottish Chaucerians (John Major, James I of Scotland, Henryson, Dunbar, Douglas, Sir David Lyndsay) and the folk poets closer to his own day (Ramsay, James Macpherson, Fergusson); he took the best from their forms and content and made them his own. Thus, he probably could not be termed an “original” poet, although he had to work hard to set the tone and style to his readers’ tastes. His countrymen embraced his poetry because they found the cadence, the music, and the dialect to be those of their own hearts and minds. The vigor and the deep love may have been peculiar to Burns, but the remaining qualities had existed longer than anyone could determine.
Still, writing in the relatively remote confines of Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century, Burns was not totally alien to the neoclassical norm of British letters. If Alexander Pope or Henry Fielding or Tobias Smollett could focus upon reality and write satires to expose the frailties of humankind, so could Burns be both realistic and satiric. In his most forceful poems—such as “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “The Holy Fair,” and “Address to the Unco Guid”—he set out to expose the religious hypocrites of his day, but at the same time to portray, clearly and truthfully, both the beautiful and the ugly qualities of Scottish life and character. Burns’s poetry may not always be even in quality or consistent in force, but it certainly always conveys an air of truthfulness.
If Burns’s poetry reverberates with the remoteness of rural Scotland, it is because he found the perfect poetic environment for the universal themes of his works. In 1803, William Wordsworth stood beside his grave and contemplated “How Verse may build a princely throne/ On humble truth.” The throne was carved out of Burns’s understanding of the most significant theme of his time—the democratic spirit (which helps to explain Wordsworth’s tribute). Throughout, the Scottish bard salutes the worth of pure “man,” the man viewed outside the context of station or wealth. Certainly, Burns was sensitive to the principles and causes that spawned the revolutions in America and in France; in fact, closer to home, the Jacobite rebellion sparked by the landing of the Young Pretender from France had occurred only nine years before the poet’s birth. By nature, he was a political liberal, and his poems take advantage of every opportunity for humans or beasts to cry for freedom. Again, it was Wordsworth who identified Burns as a poet of the literary revolution—Romanticism—that later rushed through the open gates and into the nineteenth century.
Poetic qualities
Few will question that, ultimately, Burns’s strength as a poet is to be found in the lyrical quality of his songs. That quality simply stood far above his other virtues—his ability to observe and to penetrate until he discovered the essence of a particular subject, his skill in description and satire, and his striving to achieve personal and intellectual independence. In his songs, he developed the ability to record, with the utmost ease, the emotions of the common people of whom he wrote. Burns’s reliance on native Scottish tradition was both a limitation and a strength. For example, although he genuinely enjoyed the poetry of James Thomson (1700-1748), the Edinburgh University graduate who ventured to London and successfully challenged the artificiality of English poetry, Burns could not possibly have written a Scottish sequel to The Seasons (1730, 1744). Instead, he focused upon the simple Scottish farmer, upon the man hard at work and enjoying social relationships, not upon the prevalent eighteenth century themes of solitude and retirement. In Burns, then, the reader sees strong native feeling and spontaneous expression, the source of which was inherited, not learned.
Another quality of Burns’s poetry that merits attention is his versatility, the range of human emotions that exists throughout his verse. He could function as a satirist, and he could sound the most ardent notes of patriotism. His humor was neither vulgar nor harsh, but quiet, with considerable control—as in “Address to the Deil,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Mountain Daisy.” As a lover, as one who obviously loved to love and be loved, he wrote lyrical pieces that could capture the essence of human passion. The lyric forms allowed for the fullest expression of his versatility, most of which came about during the last ten years of his relatively short life.
Capturing national spirit
From 1787 until his death in the summer of 1796, Burns committed himself to steady literary activity. He became associated with James Johnson, an uneducated engraver and enthusiastic collector and publisher of Scottish songs. From 1787 to 1804, Johnson gathered those songs into a five-volume Scots Musical Museum, and Burns served as his principal editor. Then the poet became associated with George Thomson, whose Select Collection of Scottish Airs reached six volumes between 1793 and 1811. Burns’s temperament seemed suited to such a combination of scholarly activity and poetic productivity, but he never accepted money for his contributions. The writing, rewriting, and transformation of some three hundred old songs and ballads would serve as his most singular gift to his nation. In reworking those antiquated songs and popular ballads, he returned to Scotland, albeit in somewhat modified form, a large portion of its culture that had for so long remained in obscurity. Thus, an old drinking song emerged as “Auld Lang Syne,” while a disreputable ballad became “John Anderson My Jo.” Finally, the Johnson and Thomson collections became outlets for certain of his more famous original songs: “For A’ That and A’ That” and “Scots, Wha Hae wi’ Wallace Bled,” as well as such love lyrics as “Highland Mary” and “Thou Lingering Star.” Because of his love of and gift for the traditional Scots folk songs and ballads, Burns wrote and sang for Scotland. He became the voice and the symbol of the people and captured the national sentiment.
Melancholy strains
It would be a mistake, however, to assume that all is happily rustic, nationalistic, or patriotic with Burns. On the contrary, he has a decidedly melancholy or mournful strain. A look at such poems as “A Bard’s Epitaph” and the “Epistle to a Young Friend” demonstrates that the intellect and the passion of the poet were far from being comfortably adjusted. A conflict raged within the mind and heart of Burns as the sensibilities of an exceedingly gifted soul vied with the sordid lot that was his by birth and social position (or the lack of it). Despite the appearance and even the actuality of productivity during his last five years, the final stage of Burns’s career reflects, in the soberest of terms, the degradation of genius. Nevertheless, his muse remained alive and alert, as his passions seethed within him until they found outlets in rhyme.
Burns controlled his passion so that, particularly in his songs, there is abundant evidence of sense and beauty. To his credit, he remained aware of the conflict within him and drew strength from the clash of experiences, of habits, and of emotions which, somehow, he managed to regulate and harmonize. Few will argue that certain of the songs (“Mary Morison,” “My Nanie O,” and “Of A’ the Airts the Wind Can Blow”) hang heavy with serious and extremely pathetic and passionate strains. Since such heaviness had its origin in the Scottish tradition, Burns could effectively hide his own melancholy behind the Lugar or the banks of Bonnie Doon.
Moral element
Such conclusions invariably lead to the question of a religious or moral element in Burns’s poetry. Assuredly, the more religious among Burns scholars have difficulty with such poems as “The Holy Fair,” “Holy Willie,” and the satiric pieces in which the poet ridiculed religious and ecclesiastical ideals and personages. No doubt Burns’s own moral conduct was far from perfect, but the careful reader of his poetry realizes immediately that Burns never ridiculed religion; rather, he heaped scorn only upon those religious institutions that appeared ridiculous and lacked the insight to recognize obvious weaknesses. Indeed, the poet often seems to be looking for virtue and morality, seeking to replace the sordid scenes of his own world with the piety of another time and place. He sought a world beyond and above the grotesqueness of his own debauchery, a world dominated by order, love, truth, and joy. That is about the best he could have done for himself. Even had Burns been the epitome of sobriety, morality, and social and religious conformity, religious expression would probably not have been high on his list of poetic priorities. He inherited the poetic legacy of Scotland—a national treasure found outside the limits of the Kirk, a vault not of hymns and psalm paraphrases, but of songs and ballads. Such were the constituent parts of Burns’s poetic morality.
Burns’s language and poetic methods seem to distract only the impatient among his readers. To begin with, he believed that the vernacular ought never to be seen as low or harsh, or even as prostituted English. Rather, Burns came to know and to understand the Scots dialect and to manipulate it for his own poetic purpose. At the outset, he claimed to have turned his back upon formal bodies of knowledge, upon books, and to have taken full advantage of what he termed “Nature’s fire” as the only learning necessary for his art. Nature may have provided the attraction toward the Scots dialect, but Burns himself knew exactly what to do with it.
Close attention to his letters and to the details of his life will yield the steps of his self-education. He read Thomas Salmon’s Geographical and Historical Grammar (1749) and a New System of Modern Geography, History, and Modern Grammar (1770), by William Guthrie (1708-1770), both of which provided descriptions and examples of Scotland’s traditions and language, although nothing of poetic contexts. Then he turned to Jethro Tull (1680-1740), the Hungerford farmer and inventor, who wrote several volumes on the general subject of “horse-hoeing husbandry” (1731-1739), and to the Reverend Adam Dickson of Edinburgh, who wrote A Treatise on Agriculture (1762, 1765, 1769) and the two-volume The Husbandry of the Ancients (1788). Thus, Burns was well versed in the specifics of rural Scotland by the time he discovered his most helpful source, the poetry of Robert Fergusson, who had managed successfully to capture the dialect of enlightened Edinburgh. Burns had his models, and he simply shifted the sounds and the scenes from Scotland’s capital to rural Ayrshire.
Poems
To simplify matters even further, Burns himself had actually stood behind the plow. Little wonder, then, that the Kilmarnock edition of the Poems succeeded on the basis of such pieces as “The Twa Dogs,” “The Holy Fair,” “Address to the Deil,” “Halloween,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “To a Mouse,” and “To a Mountain-Daisy.” Burns had effectively described Scottish life as Scots themselves (as well as those south of the Tweed) had come to know it. More important, the poems in that initial collection displayed to the world the poet’s full intellectual range of wit and sentiment, although his readers received nothing that had not already been a part of their long tradition. Essentially, the Edinburgh edition of the following year gave the world more of the same, and Burns’s readers discovered that the poet’s move from Ayrshire to Edinburgh had not changed his sources or his purpose. The new poems—among them “Death and Dr. Hornbook,” “The Brigs of Ayr,” “Address to the Unco Guid,” “John Barleycorn,” and “Green Grow the Rushes”—still held to the pictures of Scottish life and to the vernacular, still held to the influence of Robert Fergusson’s Scots Poems (1773).
By the time Burns had done some substantive work on James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum, however, his art had assumed a new dimension, the writing and revision of the Scots song. The poet became a singer, providing his own accompaniment by the simple means of humming to himself as he wrote, and trying (as he explained) to catch the inspiration and the enthusiasm so strongly characterized in the traditional poetry. He set out to master the tune, then to compose for that particular strain. In other words, he demanded that for the song, musical expression must dictate the poetic theme. Nevertheless, Burns was the first to admit his weakness as a musician, making no claims even to musical taste. For him, as a poet, music was instinctive, supplied by nature to complement his art. Thus, he felt unable to deal with the technical aspects of music as a formal discipline. What he could do, however, was to react quickly to what he termed “many little melodies” and to give new and fresh poetic and musical expression to something like “Scots Wha Hae,” one of the oldest of Scottish airs. Through the songs, Burns clearly preserved tradition, while, at the same time, he maintained his originality. This tradition was the genuine expression of the people who, from generation to generation, echoed the essence of their very existence; Burns gave it sufficient clarity and strength to carry it forward into the next century and beyond. The effect of those more than three hundred songs was, simply, to cede Burns the title of Scotland’s national poet—a title that he earned because of his poetic rather than his political voice.
“Tam O’ Shanter”
Perhaps the one poem that demonstrates Burns’s ability as a serious and deliberate craftsman, a true poet, is “Tam O’ Shanter” (1790, 1791). More than anything else, this piece of 224 lines transports its creator away from the “Heaven-taught plowman” image, from the label of the boy genius whose poetry is nothing more than one large manifestation of the spontaneous overflow of his native enthusiasm. Burns wrote “Tam O’ Shanter” for a volume on Scottish antiquity and based it on a witch story told about Alloway Kirk, an old ruin near the poet’s house in Ayr. However, he turned that tale into a mock-heroic rendering of folk material that comes close, in genre and in poetic quality, to Geoffrey Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale.” Burns specifically set out to construct his most sustained and most artistic production; in his own words, he remained aware of the “spice of roguish waggery” within the poem, but he also took considerable pains to ensure that the force of his poetic genius and “finishing polish” would not go unrecognized. Burns’s manipulation of his dipsomaniacal hero and his misadventures constitutes a masterful blending of the serious and the comic. The moralists of his day objected vehemently to the ribald elements of the poem. Early in the next century, William Wordsworth, whose strongest drink was probably water, attacked the attackers of “Tam O’ Shanter” (as well as those who objected to all of Burns’s poetry on moral grounds) by labeling them impenetrable dunces and narrow-minded puritans. Wordsworth saw the poem as a delightful picture of the rustic adventurer’s convivial exaltation; if the poem lacked clear moral purpose, maintained England’s laureate, it at least provided the clearest possible moral effect.
Legacy
The final issue raised by Burns’s poetry is his place in literary history—an issue that has always prompted spirited debate. There is no doubt that Burns shares common impulses with Wordsworth and the Romantic movement, particularly in his preoccupation with folklore and the language of the people, yet neither is there any evidence of Burns’s fundamental dissatisfaction with the dominant critical criteria and principal literary assumptions of eighteenth century England. The readers of his songs will be hard put to discover lush scenery or majestic mountains, or even the sea—although all were in easy reach of his eye and his mind. If he expressed no poetic interest in such aspects of nature close at hand, however, he turned even less in the direction of the distant and the exotic.
Instead, he looked long and hard at the farmer, the mouse, and the louse, and he contemplated each; the mountains, the nightingale, the skylark he also saw, but chose to leave them to the next generation of poets. In other words, Burns did not seek new directions for his poetry; instead, he took full advantage of what existed and of what had come before. He grasped literary imitation firmly and gave that form the most significance and prominence it had enjoyed since the late Restoration and the Augustan Age. Burns wrote satire and he wrote songs, but he invented neither. Rather, he served as an exploiter of tradition; he gathered inherited motifs, rhetorical conventions, and familiar language and produced art. The reader of the present century should see no less or expect no more from Burns’s poetical character.