Robert Burns: How the man became myth

Myth is produced on the back of a remarkable life, work or events. In the case of Robert Burns, his life and work are both remarkable: over 200 poems and 400 songs along with more than 800 letters make up a body of creative work standing within the first rank of western literature. This includes innovative poetry such as ‘To a Mouse’, with its iconic line ‘the best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men’, and ‘Holy Willie’s Prayer’, one of the great dramatic monologues of European poetry.

Burns’s long poem ‘Tam o’ Shanter’, a technical tour de force in its handling of rhyming couplets, is a great phantasmagoria, comical and psychological, colliding the worlds of folk tradition and Enlightenment. His greatest hits among the songs include ‘Auld Lang Syne’, ‘Ae Fond Kiss, ‘Green Grow the Rashes, O’, ‘A Red, Red Rose’, ‘John Anderson My Jo’ and a whole raft of Jacobite songs – these have become a cornerstone of the modern folk music movement. With all of these texts and numerous others, we have an output so good it is really no surprise that it has endured, propelling Burns’s status as a literary hero (which is one component among our usual ideas of myth).

In life too, Burns represents a journey from a fairly humble background to celebrity status. He is an early self-published poet, whose Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786) was enabled by those who paid for a subscription for the first edition published in Kilmarnock. Cleverly, Burns curated his own image in these volumes as a supposedly untutored writer, helped in December 1786 by Henry Mackenzie’s famous review labelling him as ‘this Heaven-taught ploughman’.

Burns presented himself as a regional poet, and later a more obviously national one, as he wrote in Scots of the landscape, of Kirk politics, of Scottish customs (including food and drink), and of wider political affairs in Britain and beyond. In addition to this, there were his not-always-easy attempts to be a farmer, first in Ayrshire and later in Dumfriesshire; another career as an exciseman; and then towards the end of his life, enlisting as a militiaman when Britain was threatened by invasion from France.

There was dynamism and tension in his life as a government employee, riding an excise route that aided his song-collecting pursuits, even as he occasionally spoiled people’s illicit endeavours and collected taxes. He had an affectionate family life but at the same time a notorious love life, fathering children with at least 5 women on at least 13 occasions. All of this makes Burns someone who is biographically fascinating, as well as the fact that he lived at a time of great social and cultural upheaval amidst agrarian, American and French revolutions.

The journey of our hero Burns does not end with his death. His work and fascinating life are part of what turned him into an enduring global icon. His work has been translated into more than 40 languages, with more than 2,000 different editions produced since his lifetime. His work long speaks to the European romantic taste; to the free-market United States of America, where Burns is read as an exemplar of talent, succeeding in spite of disadvantage; and in communist Russia and China, where he is often seen as the proletarian poet.

Burns’s astonishing ‘afterlife’, however, is most obviously apparent in its impact on the world’s cultural calendar. His birthday, 25 January, is commemorated by the phenomenon of the Burns Supper (begun in 1801), participated in by over 9 million people. This international ritual is supplemented by over 60 statues of Burns worldwide and – at one point – over 400 Burns Clubs. Today, the World Burns Federation has a dedicated journal – the Burns Chronicle, first published in 1892 – and is still going strong.

As with his poetry in its often-dazzling language, his songs too make Burns an artist of great emotional sympathy; these also ripple widely through world culture. As one example, ‘Auld Lang Syne’ was banned by the Unionists in the American Civil War as it was feared it would make the troops homesick, but it was struck up again by Union bands as the Confederacy signed its surrender (in an act of reconciliation). ‘Auld Lang Syne’ is now associated with Hogmanay (New Year’s Eve) worldwide, not least in Times Square in New York. It has also often been part of the emotional mood music of the silver screen from early times to the present, including films such as Wee Willie Winkie (1937), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), When Harry Met Sally (1989) or Sex and the City (2008).

All has not been plain sailing for the popularity of Burns, however. In 1811, William Peebles, a man with whom the poet had a great antipathy in life, produced his pamphlet Burnomania, decrying what he saw as an unhealthy cult emerging around a man whom he claimed to have been both irreligious and immoral. Admirers and detractors of Burns alike have worried over his supposedly excessive drinking and his Freemasonry, the latter seen by some people read in some quarters during his life and ever since as a somewhat louche, even dangerous secret society. Burns is sometimes read in rather simplistic form as a peasant poet, or as an avatar of a Scotland that is thought of as outmoded.

Annually there is a noticeable ‘anti-Burns’ sentiment, with journalists spinning out 800 words on why we should not celebrate Burns, or making appeals for other writers to be given more of the limelight. And yet, in both popular and scholarly spheres, there is much to interpret and indeed still discover about his work, life and legacy. Burns’s mythic quality in the end is about a writer who is not easily defined.