Scottish poet Robert Burns is born - January 25th, 1759

On this day in 1759, celebrated poet Robert Burns was born in Alloway, Scotland. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
This Day in History Class is a production of iHeartRadio.
Hello and welcome to This Day in History Class, a
show that flips through the pages of history to deliver
old news in a new way. I'm Gay Bluesier and
today we're looking back on the life of Robert Burns,

(00:21):
the bard of Scotland, who made it his life's work
to preserve and popularize the rich history and culture of
the land he held so dear. The day was January
twenty fifth, seventeen fifty nine. Celebrated poet Robert Burns was

(00:45):
born in Alloway, Scotland. He was the eldest of seven
children born to tenant farmers William Burns and Agnes Brown.
The family struggled to make a living on a farm
with poor soil, and for the first seven years of
Robert's life they lived side by side with their farm
animals in a four room cottage built by William. Despite

(01:08):
their hardships, William and Agnes insisted that their children be educated.
In seventeen sixty five, Robert and his brother Gilbert began
attending a school two miles away at Alloway Mill. Then
William and three other local families pulled their money and
hired a private tutor to teach their kids English grammar.

(01:29):
Robert Burns became an avid reader from an early age,
but he also heard plenty of traditional stories and songs
from a neighbor who sometimes helped out on the farm.
Her name was Betty Davidson, and according to Burns, he
owed his initial interest in poetry to her lyrical storytelling.
In a well known letter from his adulthood, Burns paid

(01:51):
tribute to this early influence, writing, in my infant and
boyish days, I owed much to an old maid of
my mother's, remarkable for her ignorance, credulity, and superstition. She
had I suppose the largest collection in the county of
tales and songs concerning devils, ghosts, fairies, brownies, witches, warlocks, spunkies, kelpies,

(02:15):
elf candles, dead lights, wraiths, apparitions, cantrips, giants, enchanted towers, dragons,
and other trumpery. This cultivated in me the latent seeds
of posey. Those seeds began to bore fruit when Burns
was a teenager. He penned his first composition in seventeen

(02:36):
seventy four, when he was just fifteen years old. It
was a romantic ode to a local farm girl named
Nellie Kilpatrick, or as she's called in the title, Handsome Nell.
For the next decade, Burns continued to casually make up
new poems and songs, usually while working on his family's farm. However,

(02:57):
after the death of his father in seventeen eighty five
four he began to take his writing much more seriously.
In a departure from his earlier work, he started writing
in the Scots language, using words he heard locally in
everyday speech. This new approach helped him find his true voice,
and over the next three years he penned dozens of verses,

(03:18):
the best of which he published in his first collection,
titled Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect. The book was
released in the summer of seventeen eighty six, when Burns
was twenty seven years old, and it was paid for
by subscriptions from people in the region who were already
familiar with his work. The collection was a labor of love,

(03:39):
but also a financial necessity, as the farm his father
had left him was doing quite poorly under he and
his brother's management. Things got so bad that Burns even
considered running off to Jamaica. To work as a bookkeeper
at a sugar plantation. Luckily, his poetry collection turned out
to be an instant hit, and the success convinced him

(04:00):
to stick around in Scotland. One person who surely appreciated
that decision was Jean Armor, Burns's lifelong lover and the
eventual mother to nine of his thirteen children. The couple
had gotten off to a rocky start due to Burns's
reputation as a womanizer. Jean's father didn't want his daughter

(04:21):
to have anything to do with the philandering poet, but
by the time Burns's first collection was released, she was
already pregnant with his twins. With the matter more or
less settled, the young couple tied the knot two years
later and promptly moved to their own farm, Ellisland, just
northwest of Dumfries. By that point, Burns was being hailed

(04:42):
throughout Scotland and England as a great peasant poet, or,
as he came to be known, the heaven taught plowman. Unfortunately,
neither poetry nor farming were paying the bills like they
used to, and Burns had to take a job as
an excise officer or tax collector, he didn't walk away
from writing, though. In fact, it was during this period

(05:04):
that he embarked on one of the most important literary
projects of his life, collecting folk songs for an anthology
called the Scott's Musical Museum. The project was the brainchild
of Scottish engraver and music seller James Johnson, who sought
to catalog the country's rich library of traditional folk songs.

(05:24):
Burns's contribution, which he made without seeking payment, was to
write lyrics to the mostly wordless tunes and to compose
new songs in the traditional Scottish style. It was a
chance to return to the old stories and songs that
it sparked his imagination as a child, and to make
his own additions to his country's cultural song book. The

(05:45):
endeavor would occupy the last decade of Burns's life, with
his personal output amounting to some two hundred pieces. Among
them were some of the poet's most celebrated works, including
tam O'Shanter, a Man's a Man for Awe that a
red red Rose, and Old lang Zi, the unofficial anthem
of New Year's Eve. Burns claimed that the latter song

(06:09):
was pre existing and that he merely quote took it
down from an old man, but literary experts suspect that
he put his own unique spin on the lyrics. In total,
Robert Burns is thought to have penned more than seven
hundred works in his lifetime, an impressive feat, especially in
light of how brief his life was. The poet had

(06:30):
suffered from a weak heart for decades, possibly as a
consequence of the backbreaking farm labor he performed in his youth.
In seventeen ninety six, the condition was exacerbated by a
bout of rheumatic fever, and he passed away not long
after at the age of thirty seven. In a bittersweet coincidence,
Gene Armour gave birth to their last son, Maxwell, on

(06:53):
the same day as Burns's funeral. Although he died young,
Robert Burns's body of work in shrew Ord, his legacy
would live on not only in Scotland but all over
the world because although his cultural identity as a Scotsman
is ever present in his poetry, so too are universal
themes such as injustice, oppression, hypocrisy, the hardships of rural life,

(07:17):
and of course, romantic passion. His work was cited as
a direct inspiration by many of the great poets who
followed him, including William Wordsworth, Samuel Coleridge and Percy bish Shelley.
Many of his poems and songs are still as popular
in Scotland today as they were when first written, and
one of the clearest examples of Burns's impact on Scottish

(07:39):
culture is the memorial celebration known as Burns Night. The
first of these events was held on the fifth anniversary
of Burns's death and was attended by nine of his
closest friends. Gathered at the poet's birthplace in Alloway. They
ate a supper of hackis, recited his poetry, and toasted
their departed friend with glasses of whiskey and a speech

(08:02):
that's now known as the Immortal Memory. The following year,
the celebration was moved to Burns's birthday, and as time
went on, more and more people began to participate. Today,
Burns Night is practically a national holiday in Scotland, though
the celebrations now take place in many other countries as well.

(08:22):
For the most part, the proceedings are about the same,
beginning with the saying of a short prayer called the
Selkirk Grace followed by a meal of haggis, accompanied by
bagpipe music and a recitation of Burns's poem honoring the
national dish address to a haggis. Once the meal is finished,
the Immortal Memory is given along with more readings of

(08:44):
Burns's work, and the whole event concludes with everyone singing
a round of old Lang sign. These raucous yet sentimental
celebrations are a fitting tribute to Scotland's best loved poet,
a lifelong pleasure seeker and man of the peace who
sought to preserve his country's heritage and wound up becoming
one of the most treasured parts of it. I'm Gabe

(09:09):
Bluesier and hopefully you now know a little more about
history today than you did yesterday. You can learn even
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(09:31):
iHeartMedia dot com. Thanks to Chandler Mays for producing the show,
and thanks to you for listening. I'll see you back
here again tomorrow for another day in History Class