BURNS, ROBERT. — Scottish lyric poet, born 25 January 1759, died 21 July 1796. Born on a farm in Ayrshire during a stormy night, he led a life that was predominantly tempestuous. He spent his childhood between intermittent studies and rural labours, from which his first songs emerged. In his youth he sought distraction in pleasure; he withdrew from it, briefly, upon the death of his father (1784), from whom he inherited the lot of a wandering and harassed farmer.
A plan to travel to Jamaica was abandoned following the publication of his first volume of verse (Poems, 1786), which brought him renown and opened to him the salons of Edinburgh, where he met Walter Scott and, at the same time, encountered the empty splendour of high society. It was a searing encounter, which drove the disappointed B. back to country life, where he spent his final years in a renewed flowering of song, but also in a decline into irregularity that hastened his premature end in Dumfries.
Resentful toward a world that pushed him to the social margins because of his condition as a poor peasant, B. turned toward his companions in misfortune: the oppressed,
the outcasts and even the lost, whose aspirations and deviations he sang with popular realism; and toward animals, which he saw as subject to a universal, suffering transience. His voice, now robust, now tender and always original, is especially enkindled when he recalls the countryside and loves or lashes out at Calvinist rigidities. Yet even over the notes of the crudest sensuality there lies a veil of pessimism, which gives the hours of sought-after intoxication the sense of an escape from dread, a truce in the moral conflict of a conscience inadequately sustained by a narrowly deistic faith. B.’s poetry, a reflection of this inner insufficiency, constitutes, especially through its expressive immediacy, an interesting prelude to Romanticism.