Burns, Robert

BURNS, ROBERT. - Scottish lyric poet, b. 25 Jan. 1759, d. 21 July 1796. Born on a farm in Ayrshire during a stormy night, he led a predominantly tempestuous life. He spent his childhood between sporadic studies and rustic labors, from which his first songs sprang. In his youth he sought oblivion in pleasures; he withdrew from them, for a short while, upon the death of his father (1784), whose fate as a nomadic and harassed farmer he inherited.

A plan of his to travel to Jamaica was abandoned following the publication of his first volume of verse (Poems, 1786), which brought him renown and opened for him the salons of Edinburgh, where he met Walter Scott and, at the same time, the empty splendor of high society. It was a searing contact, which drove the disillusioned B. back to the life of the fields, to spend there his last years in a reflowering of song, but also in a lapse into irregularity, which hastened, in Dumfries, his early end.

Tormented by a world that pushed him to the social margins because of his condition as a poor peasant, B. inclined toward his companions in destiny: the oppressed, the outcast and, indeed, the lost, whose aspirations and deviations he sang with plebeian realism; toward animals, which he saw as subject to a universal, suffering transience. His voice, now robust, now tender and always original, kindles above all when he evokes countryside and loves or when he lashes out at Calvinist rigidities. But even over the notes of crudest sensuality a veil of pessimism is spread, which gives to the hours of sought intoxication the sense of an escape from dread, of a truce in the moral conflict of a conscience poorly sustained by a narrowly deistic faith. B.'s poetry, mirror of such inner insufficiency, constitutes, especially for its expressive immediacy, an interesting prelude to Romanticism.

Enzo Navarra