Early life
Robert Burns was born on January 25, 1759 in the village of Alloway near Ayr. He came from a relatively poor, tenant-farmer background, although he received a good education and read avidly as a youngster. It is during his years as a teenager and young man working on farms that he developed some of the passions that would colour the rest of his life - poetry, nature, women and drink.

In 1785 Burns met perhaps the most famous and long-suffering of his female companions, Jean Armour. The union was hotly contested by Jean’s father - until, that is, the poet received public acclaim. Burns, ever the romantic, planned to run away to Jamaica with his lover, but his plan was foiled eventually by the advent of his own fame in Scotland.

Poetry in motion
Fame, but not necessarily fortune, followed in the wake of Burns’s first publication: "Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect" (Kilmarnock Edition). The collection contains many of his best loved poems, including "The Cotter's Saturday Night", "To a Mouse" and "To a Louse".

Favourable reviews from the literati in Edinburgh drew him to the capital where another of the most enduring Burns myths was born: that of the ploughman poet. Burns’s poems complemented the growing literary taste for pastoral pleasures and the type of romanticism that would dominate the literary scene for the next century or so, and he learned to play on these notions to his own advantage.

Many, however, would contest the depiction of Burns as the "heaven-taught ploughman", an innocent whose poetic inspiration was pure and direct from the divine. Such accounts of Burns conveniently gloss over his high level of education, his familiarity with literary mores and his often radical political convictions.

A tale of two tongues
Burns’s poetry at this time chopped and changed between English and Scots and this perhaps reflected his own ambivalent feelings towards the Edinburgh bourgeoisie. It was on his return to farming near Dumfries in 1788 that he penned his masterpiece in the Scots vernacular, "Tam O'Shanter" (1790). Around this time Burns was also contributing to the "The Scots Musical Museum" with immortal songs like "Auld Lang Syne" and "My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose".


In 1789 the poet became an Excise Officer, a fact that probably had many of his drinking partners choking on their ale and provided yet another of the contradictions that separated Burns’s life from his poetry. However, supporting his wife and family required funds, so Burns had to balance his increasingly radical political views with the practicalities of life. He remained an Excise Officer until his death, although he had enough humility to recognise the irony of his own situation in the poem "The De'ils Awa' Wi' The Exciseman", in which the whole community rejoices as the Devil appears to claim the local Excise Officer as his own.

Never averse to verse
Burns was prolific in poet output throughout most of his life and could barely write a shopping a list or letter without putting it in verse.

In 1795 he sent his publisher "For a' that and a' that", a song which vocalised his support for the political radicalism which was beginning to infiltrate British society, especially through Thomas Paine’s controversial work, "The Rights of Man".

Although these notions of equality and liberty were already sweeping through the western world in the light of the turmoil of both the French and American Revolutions, Burns’s poetry had always warmed to these ideals with a peculiarly Scottish lilt. After all, the rhetoric of freedom and equality had been prevalent in Scottish literature since the times of the Bruce and the Wallace. The Bard should always be seen in his national context: as the champion of the underdog in an underdog country.