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Robert Burns Biography

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BURNS, ROBERT (1759-96), The great lyric poet of Scotland. He was born at Alloway, in Ayrshire, Jan. 25, 1759. His father, then a nursery gardener and afterward the occupant of a small farm, had to struggle all his life with poverty and misfortune, but made every exertion to give his children a good education; and the boy was able to enjoy a considerable amount of instruction and miscellaneous reading in spite of his poverty. Among the books placed in his way were the Spectator, Locke's Essay, and Pope's Iliad. He learned French and some Latin; and he knew Allan Ramsay and the popular songs of Scotland. In his seventeenth year he wrote his first poem, addressed to Nelly Kilpatrick, by whose side he had worked in the fields. In 1777 he was sent to study surveying in the house of his uncle, Samuel Brown, at Ballochneil. Here he fell into the company of some "jovial smugglers" and began to realize the force of the traditional association of wine, woman, and song. His father was now trying another farm at Lochlea, near Tarbolton, to which the young poet returned, probably feeling himself not a little of a man of the world. In 1780 he was one of the founders of a "Bachelors Club" at Tarbolton, at whose meetings such weighty topics as the relative merits of love and friendship were gravely discussed. The love affairs which have provoked so much ethical controversy continually beset him. The generally lax morality of the Scotch peasantry at the period may partly account for, if not excuse, his failings in this direction. He was for a while seriously smitten by the charms of a farmers daughter named Ellison Begbie, who is supposed to be the original of his Mary Morison; but she prudently declined an alliance, and in the summer of 1781 he went to Irvine to join a relative of his mothers in a flax-dressing business; but a convival celebration of the next new year's advent ended in the burning down of the shop. Returning to Lochlea, he lived quietly and temperately after this reverse; and after his father's death, in 1784, he and his brother Gilbert settled on a small farm, which they had taken in the previous autumn at Mossgiel, near Mauchline. Here he became acquainted with several educated men and wrote some of his best-known poems, such as "The Jolly Beggars," "The Cottar's Saturday Night," and the lines "To a Mouse." He had already begun to think of publication, his brother having assured him that his "Epistle to Davie" would bear being printed, when the perplexing consequences of his love affair with Jean Armour (to whom he had given, under pressure, a written certificate that she was his wife, but who had been induced to repudiate him) determined him to emigrate. He accordingly published a volume of poems in July, 1786, with a view to making his passage money to Jamaica. Meantime, from May to October of the same year (while still able to protest on June 6 that he loved Jean to distraction), he developed a passionate attachment to Mary Campbell, who died of a fever, and was commemorated by some of his most pathetic poems, "To Mary in Heaven" and "Highland Mary." The success of his little volume and negotiations for a second edition decided him to stay in Scotland, and finally in November drew him to Edinburgh. Here he was received with enthusiasm in good society, and made a favorable impression by the dignified plainness and simplicity of which Scott, who then saw him, speaks. From the second edition of his poems (April, 1787) he received in the end about £500. While waiting for payment he traveled agreeably in various company and renewed his old relations with Jean Armour, to whom he was legally married in August, 1788. Before this, in March, he had been appointed to a place in the excise and had taken the lease of a farm at Ellisland, near Dumfries. The farm not paying too well, Burns took up his duties as exciseman and discharged them vigorously, though not with excessive sternness. Here he wrote "Tam 'o Shanter" in a single day for Grose, the antiquarian, in whose Antiquities of Scotland (1791) it was first published. In December, 1791, having given up his farm, he settled in Dumfries on a salary of £70 a year. Some unguarded political expressions drew upon him the suspicion of the government, and he came near losing his post. Possibly embittered by what he felt to be injustice, he allowed his habits of dissipation to grow on him, to the detriment of both his reputation and his health. All the while, however, his poetical activity continued, though he indignantly refused offers of a regular salary for contributions to the London Star and Morning Chronicle. Broken in health and spirits, he died July 21, 1796.

Burns was of about the average height and of heavy build, with features inclined to coarseness. According to Scott, the portraits (of which the most trustworthy is that by Nasmyth, 1787) have unduly refined them. His face became singularly animated and expressive in conversation, and numerous observers have commented on the extraordinary glow of his fine eyes. "I never saw such another eye," says Scott, "in any human head." His character has perhaps been sufficiently indicated above; but if regrettably weak in certain directions, it had very noble elements-an honorable pride, a sense of duty towards his relatives, and a real desire to act a manly and not a heartless part. His poetry was nearly always written on the spur of the moment-the response of the feelings to the immediate circumstances. Its charm and power lie in the justness of the feelings expressed and in the truthfulness and freshness which it derives direct from life. Seldom have such manliness, tenderness, and passion been united as in the songs of Burns. He is weak only when, acting on bad advice, like David in Sauls armor, he tries to write in the conventional English instead of the simple, natural Scottish dialect. He had no slight influence in preparing the way for that outburst of the natural in English poetry, whose epoch-making date, the publication of the Lyrical Ballads, falls only two years after his death. (See Lyric Poetry; Romanticism.) The hundredth anniversaries of his birth and death were celebrated with immense enthusiasm, not only in Scotland, but throughout the English-speaking world.