BURNS, Robert. - Scottish lyric poet, b. 25 January 1759, d. 21 July 1796. Born on a farm in Ayrshire during a stormy night, his life was largely tempestuous. He spent his youth alternating between sporadic studies and backbreaking farm labour, from which his earliest songs emerged. In his youth he sought stupefaction in pleasure; he withdrew from it, briefly, at his father’s death (1784), inheriting the latter’s fate as a wandering and harassed farmer.
A projected voyage to Jamaica was abandoned after the publication of his first volume of verse (Poems, 1786), which brought him renown and opened the drawing-rooms of Edinburgh, where he met Walter Scott and, simultaneously, the hollow splendour of high society. The jarring contact drove the disillusioned Burns back to country life, where he spent his final years in a renewed outpouring of song but also in a heightening of dissipation that hastened his early end in Dumfries.
Tormented by a world that relegated him to the social margins because of his poverty as a peasant, Burns turned toward fellow sufferers: the oppressed, the outcast and even the lost, whose aspirations and deviations he sang with popular realism; toward animals, which he saw as subject to universal suffering and transience. His voice, now robust, now tender and always original, is especially stirred when he evokes fields and loves or lashes out at Calvinist rigidity. Yet even in the notes of harsh sensuality a veil of pessimism spreads, lending the hours of sought-after intoxication the sense of an escape from dread, a truce in the moral conflict of a conscience ill-supported by a narrowly deistic faith.
Burns’s poetry, a mirror of such inner insufficiency, constitutes—especially for its immediate expressiveness—an interesting prelude to Romanticism.