Robert Burns is the best known of all Scottish poets. He is most admired for having voiced the attitudes of the common person and for his innate lyrical sense. His poems celebrate the simple, and often earthy, love between man and woman, the pleasures of convivial drinking, and the fierce pride of the independent individual. Writing in the last quarter of the 18th century, Burns combined the sentimental tradition of such poets as James Thomson and William Shenstone with the Scottish vernacular tradition of Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson to produce some of the best lyrics in English literature. His emphasis on natural simplicity and the rights of the individual exerted considerable influence on the English romantic poets. Burns was born on Jan. 25, 1759, into the family of a peasant farmer in rural southwest Scotland. He took up farming at an early age but was not successful. At the same time, he began writing poems for local circulation and had them published in Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) in the small town of Kilmarnock. This work, which contains most of his poems, was expanded in 1787 and again in 1793. Copies of the Kilmarnock edition reached the literati in Edinburgh, who were immediately impressed to find their theories about the sensitivity of the common man confirmed by what they called this "ploughman poet." Burns spent the winters of 1786-87 and 1787-88 in Edinburgh as a national celebrity, but he disliked the condescension with which he was treated and so returned to farming. In 1789 he obtained the post of exciseman, or inspector, but the hard labor of his early farming years, along with the heavy drinking, had ruined his health, and he died on July 21, 1796. Most of Burns's poems are short, lyrical pieces. "Holy Willie's Prayer" is an exquisite satire revealing the hypocrisy of a sour, self-righteous man; it uses the dramatic monologue form to create a masterpiece of irony. "The Jolly Beggars," a collection of seven songs, depicts in vivid, dramatic detail a disreputable company of outcasts. "The Cotter's Saturday Night" was for a long time the most highly regarded of Burns's poems, but it is flawed by Burns's use of sentimental English diction to flood the reader with emotion in contemplating the homely details of peasant life. Burns's single narrative poem, "Tam o'Shanter," uses Gothic conventions for comic effect and is remarkable for its complex narrative voice, skillful meter and pacing, and successful fusion of English and Scots diction. His many songs, such as "Auld Lang Syne" and "A Red, Red Rose," are concise expressions of emotion ranging from the tender to the bawdy. In providing vivid details of pastoral life and in delicately fitting the words to music, Burns proved himself a master of this genre. Burns has become a national hero in Scotland in the last two centuries. Many of his admirers have chosen to sentimentalize him, disregarding his true gifts and status as a poet. His overwhelming popularity led most 19th-century Scottish writers to create lifelessly sentimental imitations of Burns's pastoral verse. Not until the poems of Hugh MacDiarmid, written more than a century after Burns's death, did Scottish literature begin to free itself from Burns's influence. Although the sentimentalizing cult survives today, more astute scholars and critics now rank Burns as a major Scottish poet and one of the finest lyricists of the 18th century. R. L. Abrahamson |
