Robert Burns, (born January 25, 1759, Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland died July 21, 1796, Dumfries, Dumfriesshire), national poet of Scotland, who wrote lyrics and songs in Scots and in English. He was also famous for his amours and his rebellion against orthodox religion and morality. Burns’s father had come to Ayrshire from Kincardineshire in an endeavour to improve his fortunes, but, though he worked immensely hard first on the farm of Mount Oliphant, which he leased in 1766, and then on that of Lochlea, which he took in 1777, ill luck dogged him, and he died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt.
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Scotland s most famous poet almost relocated to the Caribbean
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If Robert Burns had got his way we might celebrate Burns Night by eating rice and peas and jerk chicken – perhaps with a ginger beer or a Red Stripe – rather than haggis, neaps and a dram. The tough lot of a farmer’s son and, later, as a tenant farmer, and the birth of no fewer than three illegitimate daughters in the space of a year, led Burns to seriously contemplate voyaging to the Caribbean to try his luck over there.
Chances are, if he’d made the break and lived a colonial’s life in the sultry tropics, he’d not have produced such memorable poems and songs. Influenced by the Scottish makar tradition and espousing republicanism and traditional Scottish values, Burns is known as the “national poet of Scotland”. Sometimes dubbed a pre-Romantic, he wrote about farm life, local experiences, traditional culture and religious practices; his poems, rich in vernacular and full of emotion, influe
Life
Burns’s father had come to Ayrshire from Kincardineshire in an endeavour to improve his fortunes, but, though he worked immensely hard first on the farm of Mount Oliphant, which he leased in 1766, and then on that of Lochlea, which he took in 1777, ill luck dogged him, and he died in 1784, worn out and bankrupt. It was watching his father being thus beaten down that helped to make Robert both a rebel against the social order of his day and a bitter satirist of all forms of religious and political thought that condoned or perpetuated inhumanity. He received some formal schooling from a teacher as well as sporadically from other sources. He acquired a superficial reading knowledge of French and a bare smattering of Latin, and he read most of the important 18th-century English writers as well as Shakespeare, Milton, and Dryden. His knowledge of Scottish literature was confined in his childhood to orally transmitted folk songs and folk tales together with a modernization of the l