robert burns biography

Robert Burns

(1759-1796)

Who Was Robert Burns?

Poet Robert Burns began life as a poor tenant farmer but was able to channel his intellectual energy into poetry and song to become one of the most famous characters of Scotland's cultural history. He is best known as a pioneer of the Romantic movement for his lyrical poetry and his rewriting of Scottish folk songs, many of which are still well known across the world today. Since his death on July 21, 1796, his work has inspired many Western thinkers.

Born on January 25, 1759, in Alloway, Scotland, Robert Burns was the eldest son of tenant farmers William Burnes and Agnes Broun. After some rudimentary education, Robert’s parents encouraged him to read books by important contemporary writers as well as Shakespeare and Milton .

Since he was a boy, Burns found farm work demanding and detrimental to this health. He broke up the drudgery by writing poetry and engaging with the opposite sex. When his father died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt, it only served to deepen Burns's critical view of the religious and political establishment that perpetuated Scotland's rigid class system.

The Life of a Lover and Writer

In the years 1784 to 1788, Burns engaged in simultaneous illicit relationships that produced several illegitimate children. In 1785, he fathered his first child, Elizabeth, born out of wedlock to his mother’s servant, Elizabeth Paton, while at the same time he was courting Jean Amour. When Jean became pregnant, her father forbade the two to get married, and Jean honored her father’s wishes, at least temporarily. Enraged at Jean's rejection, Burns began wooing Mary Campbell and considered running away with her to the Caribbean. However, Mary suddenly died, changing his plans.

Amidst the domestic chaos in Burns’s life, in July 1786, he published his first major volume of verse, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect . Critics praised the work, and its appeal spanned different classes of Scottish society. With this sudden success, Burns decided to stay in Scotland, and that November, he set out for Edinburgh to bask in the glory.

Achievement and Sudden Fame

While in Edinburgh, Burns made many close friends including Agnes “Nancy” McLehose, with whom he exchanged passionate letters, but was unable to consummate the relationship. Frustrated, he began to seduce her servant, Jenny Clow, who bore him a son. Turning to business, Burns befriended James Johnson, a fledgling music publisher, who asked him for help. The result was The Scots Musical Museum , a collection of traditional music of Scotland. Tired of the urban life, Burns settled on a farm at Ellisland in the summer of 1788 and finally married Jean Amour. The couple would ultimately have nine children, only three of whom survived infancy.

In 1791, however, Burns quit farming for good and moved his family to the nearby town of Dumfries. There he accepted the position of excise officer—essentially a tax collector—and continued to write and gather traditional Scottish songs. That year he published “Tam O’Shanter,” a slightly veiled autobiographical story of a ne’er-do-well farmer, which is now considered a masterpiece of narrative poetry. In 1793 he then contributed to publisher George Thomson’s A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice . This work and The Scots Musical Museum make up the bulk of Burns’s poems and folk songs, including the well-known pieces “Auld Lang Syne,” “A Red, Red Rose” and “The Battle of Sherramuir.”

Later Years and Death

In his final three years, Burns sympathized with the French Revolution abroad and radical reform at home, neither of which was popular with many of his neighbors and friends. Never in good health, he had several bouts with illness, possibly attributed to a lifelong heart condition. On the morning of July 21, 1796, Burns died in Dumfries at age 37. The funeral took place on July 25, the same day his son Maxwell was born. A memorial edition of his poems was published to raise money for his wife and children.

Burns was a man of great intellect and considered a pioneer of the Romantic movement. Many of the early founders of socialism and liberalism found inspiration in his works. Considered the national poet of Scotland, he is celebrated there and around the world every year on "Burns Night,” January 25.

QUICK FACTS

• Name: Robert Burns
• Birth Year: 1759
• Birth date: January 25, 1759
• Birth City: Alloway
• Birth Country: Scotland
• Gender: Male
• Best Known For: Poet Robert Burns is considered one of the most famous characters of Scotland's cultural history. He is best known as a pioneer of the Romantic movement.
• Writing and Publishing
• Education and Academia
• Fiction and Poetry
• Astrological Sign: Aquarius
• Nacionalities
• Scot (Scotland)
• Death Year: 1796
• Death date: July 21, 1796
• Death City: Dumfries
• Death Country: Scotland

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• Article Title: Robert Burns Biography
• Author: Biography.com Editors
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• Last Updated: May 25, 2021
• Original Published Date: April 2, 2014
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Robert Burns

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland, on January 25, 1759. He was the first of William and Agnes Burnes’s seven children. His father, a tenant farmer, educated his children at home. Burns also attended one year of mathematics schooling and, between 1765 and 1768, he attended an “adventure” school established by his father and John Murdock. His father died in bankruptcy in 1784, and Burns and his brother Gilbert took over farm. This hard labor later contributed to the heart trouble that Burns suffered as an adult.

At the age of fifteen, Burns fell in love and, shortly thereafter, he wrote his first poem. As a young man, Burns pursued both love and poetry with uncommon zeal. In 1785, he fathered the first of his fourteen children. His biographer, DeLancey Ferguson, had said, “it was not so much that he was conspicuously sinful as that he sinned conspicuously.” Between 1784 and 1785, Burns also wrote many of the poems collected in his first book, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which was printed in 1786 and paid for by subscriptions. This collection was an immediate success and Burns was celebrated throughout England and Scotland as a great “peasant-poet.”

In 1788, Burns and his wife, Jean Armour, settled in Ellisland, where Burns was given a commission as an excise officer. He also began to assist James Johnson in collecting folk songs for an anthology entitled The Scots Musical Museum . Burns spent the final twelve years of his life editing and imitating traditional folk songs for this volume and for Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs . These volumes were essential in preserving parts of Scotland’s cultural heritage and include such well-known songs as “My Luve is Like a Red Red Rose” and “Auld Land Syne.”

Robert Burns died from heart disease at the age of thirty-seven. On the day of his death, Jean Armour gave birth to his last son, Maxwell.

Most of Burns’s poems were written in Scots. They document and celebrate traditional Scottish culture, expressions of farm life, and class and religious distinctions. Burns wrote in a variety of forms: epistles to friends, ballads , and songs. His best-known poem is the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter . He is also well known for the over three hundred songs he wrote which celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy. Burns died on July 21, 1796, at the age of thirty-seven. Even today, he is often referred to as the National Bard of Scotland.

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Robert Burns Biography

Born: January 25, 1759 Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland Died: July 21, 1796 Dumfries, Scotland Scottish poet

Intense feeling and technical skill characterizes the work of the Scottish poet Robert Burns. His best work is in Scots, the language of southern Scotland. He is one of the greatest authors of that language in the last four centuries.

Early life and education

Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, on January 25, 1759, to hard-working farmer parents. He began helping his father with farm work at the age of twelve. The difficulty of the labor later had a crippling effect on his health. Although Burns's formal schooling was limited, he loved to read and for a time he was tutored by John Murdoch, who thoroughly educated him in eighteenth-century English literature.

The family worked hard on the Ayrshire farm and at several others, but their lives were never made easier. Ongoing troubles with landlords and their agents fueled the rebellion that Burns felt against authority, which later became a major theme in his poetry. In 1784 his father died, and the family moved a few miles away to Mossgiel, Scotland. Here and in the nearby town of Mauchline, Scotland, the charming and attractive Burns began numerous love affairs, some of which extended to about 1790. (By the end of his short life he was to have fathered fourteen children by six different mothers.)

Achievement and sudden fame

While continuing to do farm work in Mossgiel, Burns began writing poetry, and his talents developed in a spectacular way. Many of his poems expressed his love of the country and its people and poked fun at his favorite target, followers of Calvinism (a religion that features a strict belief in God's absolute will over the affairs of humans). In 1786 he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at nearby Kilmarnock, Scotland, and the book was a success. At this time Burns was twenty-seven, and he had written some of the most effective and biting pieces of satire (ridicule or scorn) in the language. Among them were "Holy Willie's Prayer" (a dramatic speech that mocked a believer in Calvinism) and "The Holy Fair" (a humorous description of a Scottish religious camp meeting).

Other important poems that appeared in his first volume were "Address to the Unco Guid" (an appeal to the religious not to look down on sinners); "The Jolly Beggars" (a dramatic poem celebrating poor people); the masterful "Address to the Deil" (that is, to the Devil); "The Cotter's Saturday Night" (in praise of the Scottish countryside); and the moving "Auld Farmer's Salutation to His Mare" and "To a Mouse" (the latter a poem written to a field mouse who has been killed by a farmer while plowing). These and other poems by Burns are almost unequaled in their combination of accurate local language and depth of feeling. Not for centuries had such fine poetry been written in the Scots tongue.

But 1786 was also a year of great distress for Burns. His affair with Jean Armour had resulted in the birth of twins, and her parents refused to allow the couple to marry because of Burns's reputation as a critic of religion. In addition, Burns was in love with Mary Campbell, for whom he wrote the song "Highland Mary," but she died in 1786 as a result of giving birth to his child. Burns considered leaving the country for Jamaica, but he abandoned the plan and spent the winter in Edinburgh, Scotland, where he was praised and honored for the success of his book. Early in 1787 a new edition of his poems was published that made him famous not only throughout Scotland but also in England and internationally. After a summer and fall spent touring Scotland (the only real traveling he ever did) and restarting his affair with Jean, Burns spent a second winter in Edinburgh. In March 1788 Burns returned to Mauchline and finally married Jean, who had given birth to a second set of his twins.

Later years and his songs

After his wedding Burns turned his efforts to supporting his family. In 1788 he leased a farm at Ellisland, Scotland, forty-five miles from Mauchline. After annoying delays in the building of his house and several rough years trying to make an income from his farmland, he moved with Jean and the children to Dumfries, Scotland. In 1789 he had begun working as a tax inspector, a profession in which he continued until his death. At Ellisland Burns had little free time, but it was there that he wrote his masterpiece of comic humor "Tam o'Shanter," his one outstanding piece of narrative verse.

Burns also wrote numerous songs (some of them original lyrics for old tunes, some reworkings of old lyrics) for The Scots Musical Museum, a collection of Scottish songs with which he had been associated since 1787. From 1792 until his death he also contributed to a similar work, A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs. Most of Burns's poetic efforts in the Ellisland and Dumfries periods was in this area of song writing and song editing (he had written songs earlier but had usually not published them), and the results were very popular. Among the lyrics that he composed or reworked were "Mary Morison," "Highland Mary," "Duncan Gray," "Green Grow the Rashes, O," "Auld Lang Syne," "John Anderson, My Jo," "Scots Wha Hae Wi' Wallace Bled," "A Man's a Man for A' That," "A Red, Red Rose," and "Ye Banks and Braes o' Bonie Doon." These are true song lyrics—that is, they are not poems meant to be set to music but rather are poems written to melodies that define the rhythm.

Burns's years in Dumfries were years of work and hardship, but contrary to reports written after his death, he was not shunned by others and he did not fall into moral decline. His fellow townsmen and his coworkers respected him. His health, which always caused him problems, began to fail, and he died of heart disease on July 21, 1796. His wife gave birth to their last child on the day of his funeral.

For More Information

Lindsay, Maurice. Robert Burns: The Man, His Work, The Legend. 2nd ed. London, MacGibbon & Kee, 1968.

McIntyre, Ian. Dirt & Deity: A Life of Robert Burns. London: HarperCollins, 1995.

Sprott, Gavin. Robert Burns: Pride and Passion. Edinburgh: HMSO, 1996.

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Robert Burns Birthplace Museum

The life of robert burns, who was robert burns.

Robert ‘Rabbie’ Burns sits proudly atop the pantheon of Scottish poets. From ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’ to his ‘ Address to a Haggis ’, Burns’s work is intrinsically linked with Scottish culture.

His journey from humble rural beginnings to international renown tells the story of a man inspired by nature, class culture and love.

Burns was born in Alloway in 1759, in a cottage that his father built . He was the eldest son of tenant farmers William Burnes and Agnes Broun, but despite their modest status Robert’s parents insisted he was educated. He was encouraged to read from an early age, and even attended one year of mathematics schooling.

The young Burns was more interested in things that gave him pleasure – poetry, nature, women, drink – than he was in farm work. When his father died in 1784, Robert and his brother Gilbert took over the farm, but within a few years they were in financial trouble. To make matters worse, Burns was already the father of an illegitimate child – the first of his 13 children.

Relationships with women

Burns pursued love as energetically as he did poetry, and his passion for women defined his life and work in equal measure. From his teenage years through the peak of his career, he engaged in many illicit relationships, sometimes overlapping with each other.

However, there was one woman who was a constant in Burns’s adult life: Jean Armour. They would go on to spend most of their lives together, but when they first tried to marry, Armour’s family tore up the contract. Outraged, Burns supposedly tried to flee to the Caribbean with another woman called Mary Campbell (also known as ‘Highland Mary’), but was eventually convinced to stay in Scotland as by then his poems were beginning to attract plenty of attention.

Work & inspiration

Despite his domestic chaos, Burns managed to publish his first collection in the summer of 1786 – it made him a literary superstar at the tender age of 27.

Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was the result of an incredible poetic outpouring between 1784 and 1786. It was made up of all manner of works, including poems like ‘ To a Mouse ’ and ‘Address to the Deil’, that reflected Burns’s upbringing, his connection to rural life and above all his interest in the human condition.

After the success of this first collection, Burns spent some time in Edinburgh before officially marrying Jean Armour in 1788 and moving to Dumfries. In 1790, he penned the great narrative poem Tam o’ Shanter , a mock-heroic tale about a feckless farmer, that was rooted in Burns’s love for Scottish culture. This work immortalised Alloway Auld Kirk , Souter Johnnie and the Brig o’ Doon .

Burns’s passion for Scotland and its cultural traditions came to the fore during the last decade of his life, when he worked on The Scots Musical Museum and A Select Collection of Original Scotish Airs . Putting words to traditional folk songs as well as composing his own tunes, Burns contributed hundreds of songs and lyrical poems to these volumes, including ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’, ‘ A Red, Red Rose ’ and ‘A Man’s a Man for A’ That’.

Did you know?

Burns’s handwritten manuscript of Tam o’ Shanter had several controversial lines that he was advised to take out before publication.

Death & legacy

Robert Burns died at the age of 37, in 1796, from a rheumatic heart condition. Jean Armour gave birth to their last son, Maxwell, on the day of her husband’s funeral.

Burns’s legacy lives on across Scotland and around the world – in many countries it’s now traditional to sing ‘ Auld Lang Syne ’ when seeing in the new year. Over the centuries, Burns’s work has inspired poets such as Wordsworth, Coleridge and Shelley, and has seen him celebrated in songs, paintings and even stamps.

On 25 January 1859, on the centenary of his birth, memorial events were held all over Scotland, and now Burns Night is virtually a national holiday! In honour of our greatest poet, we sing songs, read aloud, drink plenty of whisky and address Scotland’s national dish using Burns’s own poem ‘ To a Haggis ’.

Undiscovered Scotland

Robert burns.

Robert Burns lived from 25 January 1759 to 21 July 1796. He is regarded as Scotland's national poet: an icon who has loomed large in Scottish culture and consciousness ever since his early death at the age of 37. Arguably his best known work is the song Auld Lang Syne: a long established feature of New Year celebrations in every corner of the world settled by the Scottish diaspora (which means, in effect, every corner of the world). The wider picture in Scotland at the time is set out in our Historical Timeline.

Robert Burns is known by a surprising variety of names and titles. Sometimes simply referred to as Burns or The Bard he is also known as Rabbie Burns; Robbie Burns; Scotland's favourite son; the Ploughman Poet; or the Bard of Ayrshire.

Burns was born in a cottage in Alloway in Ayrshire. He was the son of William Burnes, who was employed as a gardener by the Provost of Ayr but also tried his hand at farming. Burns started his education at John Murdoch's school in Alloway before going to school in Ayr, though family financial problems meant Burns had to leave school to work as a farm labourer. In practice much of his schooling seems to have come from his father.

In 1781 Burns went to work as a flax-dresser in Irvine, but he was soon out of work after an over-exuberant celebration of Hogmanay by the staff, including Burns, resulted in the works catching fire and being destroyed. He and his brother returned to farming near Mauchline.

But by now Burns had established the three loves of his life: wine, women, and song. The relationship with his first love, Nelly Kirkpatrick, produced a song entitled O, once I lov'd a bonnie lass, set to a traditional tune. Meanwhile he was busy fathering eight illegitimate children by five different women.

On 31 July 1786 Robert Burns published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. This collection of verse contained many poems that were later to be regarded as classics. The success of Burns' first collection was one of the factors which led him to abandon plans to emigrate to Jamaica to become a bookkeeper on a plantation (in the process leaving one of his true loves, Mary Campbell, waiting for him in vain on the dockside at Greenock ). It seems to have been with good reason that a poem Burns inscribed on the window of the Cross Keys Inn in Falkirk began: "Sound be his sleep and blythe his morn, That never did a lassie wrang."

Instead, Burns moved to Edinburgh. Here he was commissioned by publisher James Johnson to assist in the editing of a vast collection of Scottish folk songs, The Scots Musical Museum. This was published in five volumes over the course of sixteen years. In all some 150 of Burns' own songs were included, most notably Auld Lang Syne, based on a traditional folk song.

In 1788 Burns moved back to Ayrshire and married Jean Armour. The following year he took up an appointment as an Excise Officer in Dumfries to supplement the family income, and also rented a farm. Tam o' Shanter, which appeared in 1790, is possibly the best known and most enduring of his poems. Burns gave up farming in 1791 to concentrate on his writing and his Excise duties, though around this time he rejected offers of a post on the London-based Star newspaper; and declined to pursue the chance of becoming Professor of Agriculture at the University of Edinburgh.

As a major contributor to the definitive collections of Scottish songs then being assembled, Burns was becoming increasingly well known by the mid 1790s. Ironically, however, his heavy drinking and his unpopular support for the French Revolution was at the same time undermining some of his more locally-based following not to mention his health. Burns died of rheumatic fever on 21 July 1796, at the same time as his wife was giving birth to their ninth child. His growing fame and success at least afforded his widow and children a degree of comfort he had himself never quite attained.

How do you judge someone's success or their degree of their fame? Well if you take the number of statues erected as a reasonable indicator, then Robert Burns has probably done rather better than most sons of Scottish farmers. There are statues of him in places you might expect, like Dumfries, Kilmarnock, Aberdeen, Irvine and Glasgow. But it is more surprising to find them in Montreal, in Sydney, and even in London. And the town of Burns, in Allegany County, New York State, is named after him.

On a larger scale, the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum has been created in Alloway, and museums dedicated to him exist in Kirkoswald, Tarbolton and Mauchline. Dumfries is an essential port of call for anyone on a Robert Burns pilgrimage. Here you find the Robert Burns Centre, as well as The Globe Inn, his favourite pub; Robert Burns House, the house in which he spent the last three years of his life; the nearby Burns Mausoleum. Nine miles south-east of Dumfries is Brow Well, where Burns unsuccessfully sought a cure for his final illness.

Meanwhile, every year on Burns' birthday, 25 January, Burns Clubs across the globe gather at Burns Suppers on Burns Night (or Burns Nicht) and proclaim his Address to a Haggis before eating haggis. As a result, his is generally regarded to be the second most celebrated birthday worldwide. Now that's fame!

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The Life of Robert Burns: Scotland's Bard

12 min read

The word bard is of Celtic origin and means poet. As William Shakespeare is England's national bard,  Robert Burns is Scotland's. And over 250 years after he was born into a poor Ayrshire farming family, the universal appeal of many of his poems and songs endures.

Burns had a gift for putting himself into the shoes of others and sympathising with their plight. His greatest works were a vivid insight into the aspirations and anguishes of the less-privileged, his hopes for equality and a better world. Words that maintain their powerful meaning today.

Robert Burns Death and Legacy 

Robert Burns died in Dumfries on 26 July 1796, on the same day that his wife gave birth to their ninth child, a son, Maxwell. He succumbed to a form of rheumatic fever, which would have been easily treatable today. In those days, however, the cause and remedy of his ailment were unknown, and his demise was likely hastened by a course of sea-bathing in icy salt waters. 

To make matters worse, Burns died in debt, borrowing from a cousin and an old patron, George Thomson, to bail himself and his pregnant wife out of trouble. 

The fact is that Burns had lived in near poverty most of his life. He had been engaged in heavy physical farm work since he was a young boy, in a harsh climate and on a very limited diet had taken its toll. He was only thirty-seven years old when he died. 

He was buried with full military honours as a member of the local volunteer militia, the Fencibles. Burns had joined up the year before as Britain was at war with France and there was a fear of invasion. Sadly, as is so often the case, Burns' genius was only widely recognised after his death. 

Nowadays, Burns night is celebrated across the globe. People often come together to celebrate his life by singing songs, reading poems and addressing Scotland’s national dish with Burns’ poem ‘Address to a Haggis’.

Robert Burns Famous Poems 

In his short life, Burns wrote hundreds of poems  and songs that would become cherished throughout the world. His words would reach far beyond his native Scotland and continue to resonate over two centuries later words about the human spirit and condition, about nature, love, life and death that are as meaningful now as they were in Burns' time.  

His most famous poems include:

• Auld Lang Syne
• Tam o' Shanter
• Ae Fond Kiss
• Red, Red Rose
• Scots Wha Hae
• A Man's a Man for A' That

But who was this man who died young and in poverty in a small provincial town, who was almost instantly mourned by an entire nation and who is still revered over 250 years after his birth? 

Where Was Robert Burns Born? 

Burns was born on a wild and windy night in Alloway on the Ayrshire coast of Scotland, in the family house his father, William, had built with his own hands. Robert was the eldest of seven children. Burns' Cottage, now a museum, still stands today, although no longer set in rolling fields, but in the new affluent suburbs of the town of Ayr. 

Who Were Robert Burns’ Parents?  

Robert's parents were small tenant farmers. William and his wife, Agnes, struggled to make a living on poor soil. But despite their hardships they were keen to educate their offspring, so in 1765 Robert and his brother, Gilbert, were sent to a school two miles away at Alloway Mill.  

William then clubbed together with three local families to share a private tutor, a young man called John Murdoch, who taught Robert English grammar. He also made the children sing Psalms but, ironically, for someone who went on to pen some of the most well-known songs ever written, Robert's voice was, according to Murdoch, "untuneable". When Murdoch took up a post at Ayr Academy in 1772, Burns' father tutored the boys at home, although they continued taking lessons at various other schools nearby. 

The following year the family moved to another farm at Mount Oliphant, high on a hillside two miles from Alloway. The rent was steep, and the sour upland ground was difficult to cultivate. Life was tough on the new farm. Since the family couldn't afford hired help, Robert did a full day's work in the field and farmyard on a diet of oatmeal and skimmed milk even though they lived on a farm, meat was much too expensive. 

On the long, dark, bitterly cold Scottish winter nights Robert was often to be found huddled under a single candle, with his nose buried in a book. By the time he was 21 he had read Shakespeare, David Hume, his favourite philosopher Adam Smith and everything in between. These books helped to fuel his already burgeoning imagination. 

Robert Burns' Personal Life 

He had already written his first love poems when he was fifteen, to a farmer's daughter from Dalrymple. It was the beginning of his lifelong love of women and his celebration of them in poems and songs. Burns had many affairs throughout his life and enjoyed drinking with friends, but he was far from the over-sexed, booze-sodden farmhand of yore, a slightly misleading myth that has tended to overshadow his literary legacy.  

Robert Burns  fathered over a dozen children to various women, and his sexual behaviour was radical, especially in 18 th -century society. The handsome, charismatic poet undoubtedly enjoyed the company of women, from society ladies to servant girls.  

Burns' first child was by a servant, Elizabeth Paton, who worked at Lochlea farm in Tarbolton (the family had moved to the village when Robert was nineteen), and one of his most famous love affairs, though never consummated, was with the upper-class Agnes McLehose, for whom he wrote the beautiful parting song Ae Fond Kiss. 

Burns acknowledged women as individuals who had valuable insights and opinions and were stimulating. He started a life-long correspondence with sometime patron, Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop, a well-to-do Ayrshire widow who admired his poems. In his work , he managed to combine descriptions of his prurient exploits with the tenderest of emotions, memorably and simply expressed. Love (and lust!) and poetry were always to run together for Burns.

Robert Burns Poetry

By the time his first collection of poetry, 'Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect' was published in July 1786 he had founded the debating society, the Tarbolton Bachelors' Club, gained a reputation locally as an outspoken critic of the church and became a freemason. 

He had started writing seriously after his father's death in 1784 and this first collection, known as the Kilmarnock edition because that was where it was printed, emerged from the poems that had been passed around locally in manuscript form during 1784-85, gaining him regional notoriety.  

The collection included some of his best writing, including 'The Twa Dogs', 'Address to the Deil', 'Hallowe'en', 'The Cotter's Saturday Night', 'To a Mouse', and 'To a Mountain Daisy', many of which had been written at Mossgiel farm, where the family had moved in 1785. Having already written a handful of poems in English, Burns found his true voice in the Scots language, writing in words that did not come from the classical dictionary but from everyday speech. 

The Themes of Robert Burns’ Poems 

Burns’ poems touched on themes of injustice, hypocrisy, the hard life of the countryman, radicalism, anticlericalism, sexuality, gender roles, Scottish cultural identity and man's inhumanity to his fellow man. He wrote scathing satires and tender love songs delivered in a direct, playful, yet sympathetic voice that spoke to all walks of life.

Throughout his life, Burns was on the side of the poor and the downtrodden and was always anxious to speak up for them. Inequality made him angry. He was an enthusiastic supporter of the French revolution in 1789 before it turned into a bloodbath and supported the American struggle for democracy led by George Washington. 

Poetry was in Burns' blood, but the book was also born of financial necessity. The farm at Lochlea, where he worked with his younger brother, Gilbert, provided little money and an increasingly desperate Burns had considered leaving for the West Indies to find a job as an employee on the slave plantations. He had even booked a berth on a boat to Jamaica but had postponed the trip on several occasions. 

The Kilmarnock edition got 612 advance subscriptions, mostly concentrated on around a dozen individuals who sold them to other admirers. 

Robert Burns’ Life and Fame

By this time Burns had met and married Jean Armour, who bore him twins in September 1786, despite the strenuous attempts by Jean's father to prevent his daughter having anything to do with the poet owing to his opprobrious reputation. After an enforced separation, Robert and Jean were reunited , and she remained his long-suffering wife until his death. She had nine of his children and took in and nursed one of his several illegitimate offspring. 

Burns arrived in Edinburgh, Scotland's cultural capital, in November 1786 as the sensation of the season. In a review of his poems in the literary periodical ,  'The Lounger', Henry Mackenzie coined for Burns the famous epithet of the "heaven-taught ploughman". It was a sentimental moniker that stuck, the image of the rustic bard with plough in one hand and quill in the other composing poems in the Ayrshire fields. But it was far removed from the reality of Burns' life, which had been one of toil and hardship. 

Burns knew he was different and special and held centre stage in Edinburgh with his powerful charisma and passionate way with words. However, he was also aware of his low social standing in polite Edinburgh society. Poets were certainly not meant to be peasants and he found the drawing rooms of literary Edinburgh reeking with pretension, which he derided memorably in his famous poem 'Address to a Haggis'. 

In April 1787 an Edinburgh edition of 'Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect' was published, containing 22 additional poems to the Kilmarnock edition, and was subscribed to by over 1300 individuals. But Burns sold the copyright of the book to William Creech for 100 guineas and despite further editions appearing in London, Dublin, New York and Philadelphia, he made no money from these. 

That same year the first volume of James Johnston's 'Scots Musical Museum', a collection of Scottish folk songs, appeared, including three songs by Burns. Burns would go on to contribute nearly 200 songs to future volumes of the publication, many published posthumously. He toured the Highlands and the Scottish Borders collecting old Scottish tunes to which he set his verses, thus helping to preserve the songs and keep a cultural tradition alive. Some of his bawdier lyrics were collected in a notorious volume entitled 'The Merry Muses of Caledonia'. 

Despite his new-found fame in Edinburgh and beyond, Burns was struggling to support his family from either his poetry or the small farm he had leased in Ellisland, Dumfriesshire and he was forced to take a public service job in 1788. After a lifetime of unrewarded toil, he abandoned farming altogether in 1791 to become a full-time employee in the Dumfries excise, moving to a house in the town. 

Undeterred by ailing health during the winter of 1790, and depression about the fading prospects of the farm, his muse remained undimmed and he continued his prolific output of songs and poems, completing his most famous poem and arguably his masterpiece, Tam o' Shanter, in November that year. Every year on the night of Burns' birthday, 25 January, or an evening close to it, his life and work are celebrated as Burns clubs all over the world  host traditional Burns Suppers. 

The Traditional Burns Supper 

These informal suppers vary from club to club, but the general format has remained the same since Burns' friends hosted the first recorded night in his honour around the anniversary of his birth in 1801. 

Guests gather as at any informal function and the host says a few words of introduction before everyone is seated and the Selkirk Grace is said. A starter of soup, usually a Scotch broth or Cock-a-Leekie, is eaten, before the centrepiece of the meal, a haggis, is brought in while a piper plays the bagpipes.  

The host then recites 'Address to a Haggis' and at the lines 'His knife see rustic Labour dicht, An' cut you up wi' ready slicht', draws and cleans a knife before plunging it into the haggis, slicing it open from end to end in dramatic fashion. A toast is then proposed to the haggis. Mashed potatoes (champit tatties) and turnips (bashed neeps) traditionally accompany the haggis. 

When the meal is over, one of the guests makes a speech commemorating Burns and proposes a toast to the great man, known as the Immortal Memory. A toast is then made to the lassies' in recognition of Burns' fondness for the fairer sex and sometimes a female guest will reply with a humorous toast to the laddies'. Following the speeches there may be singing of songs by Burns and occasionally guests take to the floor in a whirl of Burns Scottish country dancing known as a ceilidh, although this is not a normal part of a Burns supper . 

The most important thing about a Burns Supper is to have fun. After all, the man you're paying tribute to was certainly not averse to a wee party himself! 

Photo credits: VisitScotland/Kenny Lam

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