Robert Burns

BURNS, Robert.  b. Alloway, Ayrshire, 25 January 1759; d. Dumfries, 21 July 1796. The son of a ‘cotter’, an agricultural labourer too poor to own his own house, Burns was given a good local education, read much as a child, and began to write poems while still at school. His family remained very poor, before and after his father’s death in 1784. With his brother Gilbert he continued to farm, so unsuccessfully that he contemplated emigration to Jamaica. Before leaving, however, he sent his poems to a Kilmarnock publisher, John Wilson, who printed them as Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786. They were an immediate success: this was the age in which a ‘ploughman poet’, as he came to...