Burns, whose inventiveness spanned energetic, humorous poetry in Scottish dialect and also meditative lyric, united such disparate thinkers as Byron, Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Hazlitt in praise for his poetic ability. He was one of the key influences on later Romantic poets. Born in Alloway, Ayrshire on 25 January 1759, Burns was the eldest of seven children. His father, William Burnes, was a tenant farmer whose refusal of Calvinism’s strictures had a profound influence on his son; his father insisted on Burns receiving an education alongside the vernacular tradition of the locale. Burns began writing songs in 1774 to woo a local girl, and his education repaid him as he came to marry the rhythms of local speech with the poetic eloquence of his literary models. He also founded the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club, an early rural Scottish debating society, and became a freemason in 1781. But his father’s early death in 1784 meant that Burns was responsible for his siblings and mother thereafter. He took over farming, yet this did not prevent him from producing a prodigious output of poetry. On 22 May 1785, Elizabeth Paton, a servant, gave birth to his daughter, Elizabeth, but the pair never married. Dallying with several young women, Burns also impregnated Jean Armour and continued his various flirtations with other women, despite the fury of Jean Armour’s father. Planning to flee to Jamaica, Burns was also busy arranging the publication of Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, which came out in 1786, when Burns discovered he was the father of twins. Six hundred and twelve copies of his collection were published, and all were sold within a month, to major critical fanfare.
A second, expanded edition of 3,000 copies, the Edinburgh volume of his poems, was a great success. The Scottish and English luminaries of the day welcomed Burns, despite his continued indiscretions with women, and Burns was invited to meet such figures as philosopher and historian Professor Adam Ferguson, the playwright John Home, sixteen‐year‐old Walter Scott, among others. By 1787, Burns undertook a series of tours in Scotland and northern England, and he reacquainted himself with Jean Armour, despite his resolution never to marry her. She became pregnant again, but Burns continued in his resolve. His tours had reinvigorated his fascination with Scottish dialect and folklore, and this fascination would translate into poetry that reflected his interest. On returning to Edinburgh, he agreed to contribute to, and even became the editor of, a large, six‐volume anthology with music collected by engraver James Johnson (the first volume appeared in May 1787 and the last in 1803). Apparently married to Jean Armour by 1788, Burns then trained as an excise officer. By early 1794, the depression that had sporadically afflicted him returned. Burns took to excessive drinking and suffered painfully with rheumatism. He died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796. After his death, several volumes of previously private work were published, including The Jolly Beggars (1799), The merry muses of Caledonia: a collection of favourite Scots songs, ancient and modern, selected for use of the Crochallan Fencibles (c.1800; a collection of bawdy verses), and Letters Addressed to Clarinda (1802).
Robert Crawford, ‘Burns, Robert (1759–1796)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, Oxford University Press, 2004; online edn, May 2011 [http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/4093, accessed 7 September 2015]; Robert Burns (1759–1796): doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/4093; Duncan Wu, ‘Robert Burns (1759–1796)’, in Romanticism: An Anthology, ed. Duncan Wu, 4th edn (Oxford: Wiley Blackwell, 2012), pp. 265–7.