The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography, by Robert Crawford
by David Mason

from The Hudson Review, Summer 2009

"What an antithetical mind!—tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness— sentiment, sensuality—soaring and groveling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!
     —Lord Byron

Mair nonsense has been uttered in his
      name
Than in ony's barrin' liberty and Christ.
     —Hugh MacDiarmid

Poets' real biographies are like those of birds ... their real data are in the way they sound.
     —Joseph Brodsky

My father-in-law, John Lennox, came to the United States at the age of 42. He died in Cleveland at 84, so half his life had been lived in the old country, half in the new, yet whenever he used the word "home" he meant Scotland, particularly Ayrshire, the lowland region south of Glasgow. His was a life that cherished the local—whatever could be reached on foot or by a short bus ride. My wife remembers that Edinburgh seemed like a distant dream, and her surprise at learning it was barely fifty miles away from where she was born and raised. Her mother, Hetty, lived with us for the last six years of her life, and there were times when I felt modern America had been just as much a dream to her, far less real than her own kitchen, her girls and her beloved husband. Whenever we had a full moon I would say to her, "Hetty, tell us what you did back home the night of a full moon."

"The full moon?" she would answer. "That was when we went to visit the neighbors."

She had grown up in an eighteenth-century farmhouse, built in the decade of the Jacobite rebellion and the birth of Robert Burns, and there wouldn't have been many electric lights even in her time to help them find their way home.

John Lennox missed his home. Even though the steelworks had been closed, the row houses of Glengarnock had been leveled, his aviary and garden plot were long gone, his life in America and his work at a Ford plant were somehow less real than Scotland. This is a common story—not just for the Scots but also for most nationalities on earth. Most countries have their own immigration lore in stories, songs and poems. John knew dozens of poems by heart, many of them in the Scottish dialect he loved. He had border ballads, children's rhymes, English classics like Gray's "Elegy"—the stuff they made him get at school, though he had quit school at a young age and gone to work in the steel mill. More than anything else, he had Burns.

One Thanksgiving I recorded John reciting poems. I still play the tape to students, pointing out that this was a man without a college education for whom poetry mattered because it kept his language alive. Reciting Burns's "Address to the Deil," he wasn't thinking much about the poet's whimsical literary conversation with Milton, the view he shared with Blake that Milton was "of the Devil's party." Instead, John Lennox relished the charged diction with its textures of experience:

Ae, dreary, windy, winter night,
The stars shot down wi sklentan light,
Wi' you, mysel, I gat a fright
                 Ayont the lough;
Ye, like a rash-buss, stood in sight,
                 Wi' waving sugh:

The cudgel in my nieve did shake,
Each bristl'd hair stood like a stake,
When, wi' an eldritch, stoor, quaick, quaick,
                 Amang the springs,
Awa ye squatter'd like a drake,
                 On whistling wings.

He laughed at his recitation, bemused by the speaker's terror of the Devil, who "squatter'd like a drake" and, as John put it, "scooted off." Everything in Burns's world is animated by language. The "sklentan light" of the stars is aslant, but also, according to the glossary in my edition, "aslant with malice" like a "side-look." The Devil stands like a "rash-buss" or a "clump of rushes," and emits an uncanny (eldritch), harsh (stoor) "quaick, quaick" as he departs.

To paraphrase Burns is to beggar him. To translate his diction into standard English is to flatten the magic. "He was a bit of a rascal," John admitted, "but a marvelous poet. You see, he had the advantage o' the English language and the Scottish dialect" when looking for a rhyme. Indeed, to find the sort of vitality Burns brought to verse you have to look at the likes of Shakespeare and Yeats. He was at his best one of the great lyric poets, and he remains popular the world over. His birthday, January 25, occasions paraded haggis and whiskey toasts in cities as far-flung as Athens, Denver, Adelaide and Vancouver.

Yet in some ways his popularity has worked against him. Perhaps millions—even billions—of people can sing two stanzas of "Auld Lang Syne" on New Year's Eve, unaware that Burns wrote the words, including four more stanzas. He has become an excuse for sentimental inebriation, provider of titles such as Of Mice and Men, backward-looking ploughman poet of wandering eye and dubious nationalism. Worst of all, he wrote songs, which might confuse some of our professional readers the way Bob Dylan threatens to encroach upon poetry's higher ground. Then there is the issue of dialect, the fact that Burns's poems in standard English tend to be weaker than those in Scots, and the additional problem of pronouncing him for those of us who have trouble rolling our r's. A poet not regularly taught in the classroom can seem, at least in America, nonexistent, and our standard curricula have some difficulty placing Burns. Do we pair him with Pope and the tradition of Augustan wit, or with the revolutionary energies of the Romantics? A case can be made either way. While Burns can also be read as a great poet sui generis, his intellectual and political ties to the Romantics are strong. Wordsworth honored his memory. Keats made a pilgrimage to Dumfries in 1818 to see Burns's grave and wrote of the poet's childhood house at Alloway and the Brig over the Doon made famous in "Tam o' Shanter." In a letter to J. H. Reynolds, Keats expressed his appreciation of the life as well as the work: "One song of Burns's is of more worth to you than all I could think for a whole year in his native country—His Misery is a dead weight upon the nimbleness of one's quill.... "

Leave it to Keats to dwell on the melancholy of Burns rather than the pleasure. The melancholy was real, though, as we learn (along with much more) in Robert Crawford's fine new biography. A professor of literature at the University of St. Andrews, Crawford is a good poet as well as a literary historian. While much in the new biography is familiar from legend as well as countless earlier books (in my house alone the editions seem countless, several of them containing biographical essays in microscopic print), Crawford intends his study as a corrective. He is rather hard on earlier biographers, parsimonious in his praise of some very good books, such as Ian McIntyre's Robert Burns: A Life (2001). Readers who don't want to get the sour taste of literary competition in their mouths might do well to skip Crawford's introduction and get right to the life, which is clearly conveyed with an emphasis upon three elements: Burns's love life and friendships, his poetry and song, and his politics.

Scotland's greatest poet was born in 1759 to William and Agnes Burnes (he would later change the spelling), who worked a farm near Alloway, just south of Ayr. His mother, an Ayrshire lass, was a fount of song and folk-tale, full of Scottish fatalism and social irony. "Burns did not just make songs; songs made Burns," Crawford writes with good pithiness. "The process began in early childhood, and the poet's oral memory meant he was shaped by words like these, which nurtured in him a creative disrespect for political and other kinds of authority even as he was schooled in the ways of Kirk and community."

William Burnes believed in educating both his sons while working them hard on the farm. He engaged a teacher, John Murdoch, to help with their writing, and Murdoch would later recall of the father, "He always treated superiors with a becoming respect, but he never gave the smallest encouragement to aristocratical arrogance ... He spoke the English language with more propriety (both with respect to diction and pronunciation) than any man I ever knew, with no greater advantages. This had a very good effect on the boys, who began to talk and reason like men much sooner than their neighbors."

As Shakespeare made a universe from a small library, Burns learned eloquence from the Old and New Testaments, Masson's Collection of English Prose and Verse and Fisher's English Grammar. Both the poet and his brother, Gilbert, had prodigious memories and were able to master swatches of Shakespeare and Milton. Robert loved James Thompson's The Seasons and "the John Home of a recently published Highland drama, Douglas." He also studied John Newbery's Letters on the Most Common, as well as Important Occasions in Life, a book that advocated imitation as a mode of learning.

Together with his mother's love of song, these books explain the poet's mastery of form and rhetoric, and also how he became one of the great letter writers—but what explains the brio, the exuberance, the animation of the man? Thumbing through a nineteenth-century edition of Burns, I came across a letter he wrote in 1786. By this time the Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, had been published and he was becoming famous. Written from Edinburgh to fellow-writer William Chalmers back home in Ayr, the letter brims with mischief:

MY DEAR FRIEND.—I confess I have sinned the sin for which there is hardly any forgiveness—ingratitude to friendship—in not writing you sooner; but of all men living, I had intended to have sent you an entertaining letter; and by all the plodding, stupid powers, that in nodding conceited majesty preside over the dull routine of business—a heavily-solemn oath this!—I am and have been, ever since I came to Edinburgh, as unfit to write a letter of humour as to write a commentary on the Revelation of St. John the Divine, who was banished to the Isle of Patmos by the cruel and bloody Domitian, son to Vespasian and brother to Titus, both emperors of Rome, and who was himself an emperor, and raised the second or third persecution, I forget which, against the Christians, and after throwing the said Apostle John, brother to the Apostle James, commonly called James the Greater, to distinguish him from another James, who was by some account or other known by the name of James the Less—after throwing him into a cauldron of boiling oil, from which he was miraculously preserved, he banished the poor son of Zebedee to a desert island in the Archipelago, where he was gifted with the second sight, and saw as many wild beasts as I have seen since I came to Edinburgh; which, a—circumstances not very uncommon in storytelling—brings me back to where I set out.

To make you amends for what before you reached this paragraph, you will have suffered, I enclose you two poems I have carded and spun since I passed Glenbuck.

One blank in the Address to Edinburgh—"Fair B—," is a heavenly Miss Burnet, daughter to Lord Monboddo, at whose house I have had the honour to be more than once. There has not been anything nearly like her in all the combinations of beauty, grace, and goodness, the great Creator has formed, since Milton's Eve on the first day of her existence.

My direction is—care of Andrew Bruce, merchant, Bridge Street.

                                                                                       R.B.

Imagine the reduction this would suffer in the age of email—or worse—Twitter! The paraphrasable content? Sorry I haven't written sooner. Distracted by a babe in the big city. Here's my address. The rest is gusto, a life force Burns had by the barrel, which sustained him through frequent bouts of depression.

Poetry began for Burns at the same moment sex did—or at least the bolt-upright awakening of desire. Looking back in his mid-twenties, he observed, "For my own part I got once heartily in Love, and then Rhyme and Song were, in a manner, the spontaneous language of my heart." The statement prefigures Wordsworthian theory, but it also describes with some accuracy the direct relation between Burns's life and his art. Reactive as well as inventive, he was a verse barometer of the Scottish Enlightenment measuring from the ground up—the anti-Calvinism found among the Buchanites, who preached free love, and the Masons with their anti-authoritarian bent, shaken and stirred and dashed by Burns's own prodigious sexual appetites. Though an accurate count is hard to find, he appears to have fathered fourteen children in all, half of them illegitimate (depending on how you count Jean Armour's nine children, two of whom arrived before their marriage). Whatever dalliances occurred in Rabbie's teenage years, he got into his first serious trouble at twenty-six when his mother's servant, Betty Paton, gave birth to his daughter, Elizabeth. Publicly charged with fornication, he responded in a rousing song:

Ye jovial boys who love the joys,
    The blissful joys of lovers;
Yet dare avow with dauntless brow,
    When th' bony lass discovers;
I pray draw near and lend an ear,
    And welcome in a Frater,
For I've lately been on quarantine,
    A proven Fornicator.
Before the Congregation wide
    I pass'd the muster fairly;
My handsome Betsey by my side,
    We gat our ditty rarely;
But my down cast eye by chance did spy
    What made my lips to water,
Those limbs so clean where I, between,
    Commenc'd a Fornicator.

His contempt for Kirk enforcement of moral codes and for hypocrisy in general is a winning trait, but so is the love shown toward his bastard children. You can see a dose of it in "A Poet's Welcome to his love-begotten Daughter; the first instance that entitled him to the venerable appellation of Father—":

Thou's welcome, Wean! Mischanter fa' me,
If thoughts O' thee, or yet thy Mamie,
Shall ever daunton me or awe me,
                   My bonie lady;
Or if I blush when thou shalt ca' me
                   Tyta, or Daddie.—

Tho' now they ca' me, Fornicator,
And tease my name in kintra clatter,
The mair they talk, I'm kend the better;
                   E'en let them Clash!
An auld wife's tongue's a feckless matter
                   To gie ane fash.—

Welcome! My bonie, sweet, wee Dochter!
Though ye come here a wee unsought for,
And tho' your comin I hae fought for,
                   Baith Kirk and Queir;
Yet by my faith, ye're no unwrought for,
                   That I shall swear!

He was a great one for houghmagandie and the "sparks o Nature's fire." No sooner had he fathered Elizabeth than he fell in love with Jean Armour, whose parents profoundly disapproved of his existence. As Crawford puts it:

Jean Armour was remarkable. Burns knew it. Soon after they met he called her the 'jewel' among the Mauchline Belles. Her recollections of their meeting suggest a confident woman of spirited humour. Her surviving letters (written in later life) reinforce an impression of capable intelligence. Armour's relationship with Burns required much resilience. By turns rakish, bookish and blokish, Robert, however charismatic and sensitive, was not easy to live with. Jean coped. In the course of their eleven-year relationship, she would bear him nine children, six of whom died young. Burns worked hard, composed poems intensively, philandered, experienced highs and lows of spirits, cherishing the self-image of a will-o'-the-wisp, a sometimes unstable personality. Yet to say Jean Armour simply coped underestimates her part in their relationship. Journalist John McDiarmid who knew and interviewed her called her 'well-balanced ... a clever woman' who 'possessed great shrewdness, discriminated character admirably, and frequently made very pithy remarks' ... Surviving portraits show her in age, alert, settled, even well off, managing to deal with her status as a curiosity, a 'relict', the widow of the bard.

There must have been a resigned generosity in her as well, for she would eventually raise at least one of Burns's bastards by other women. This was also the time when he had an affair with Mary Campbell, the "Highland Mary" with whom he considered immigrating to Jamaica.

Separation from Jean Armour was enforced not only by her parents but by the poet's growing success. The publication of the Kilmarnock edition of his poems in 1786 gave him the opportunity of traveling to Edinburgh two months after Jean gave birth, out of wedlock, to twins. From the capital Burns would travel to the Highlands, seeing more of the country that would eventually make him a national bard. And it was during the sojourn in the capital that he began his powerful friendship with Agnes McLehose, the "Clarinda" of poems and letters. Clearly this relationship was impassioned—Crawford thinks it may have been consummated sexually—and it lasted at least until the insatiable poet slipped into bed with McLehose's servant, an event the mistress found appalling, though she knew her friend well and might have seen it coming (pun intended).

Burns returned to Ayrshire and Jean but never gave up houghmagandie, which made a handy rhyme with brandy but meant a lot of trouble for women. Was this what we now call sex addiction? Was it neediness? Revolutionary candor? The dalliances delight in the poems, but they weighed on people in real life, and not just because of Calvinist proscription. They also troubled Burns in addition to his money troubles when he fell into his frequent depressions, some of which verged on total breakdown. The degree to which he might be diagnosed as bipolar is something we cannot confidently judge, nor can we simply condemn his appetites, a trait he shared with fellow Scot James Boswell among others. The oppressive judgment of the Kirk deserved to be met with rebellion, and I for one rejoice in Burns's celebration of sex, including his exuberant obscenity in verse, while acknowledging the complications it inevitably engendered (pun unavoidable).

Crawford relates these complications with a similar set of mixed feelings: "Throughout adult life Burns enjoyed relationships, epistolary and otherwise, with cultured literary women, while enjoying extra-marital sex with servants and barmaids. Jean remained at best a loved compromise." On one occasion in 1793, Burns appears to have come close, in a state of drunkenness, to rape, an event for which he apologized in a letter "from the regions of Hell." Still, it is hard not to love the spirit of a man so devoted to flouting the oppressions of his age. Crawford's book is particularly good at portraying Burns the revolutionary, the great poet of democratic ideals.

But even here the portrait is wrinkled. For one thing, Burns nearly immigrated to Jamaica, where he would have worked as a slave overseer—this from the author of at least one abolitionist poem. For another, Burns took as the major source of his income for the last four of his thirty-seven years a position as an excise man—not only a collector of taxes but an enforcer of laws pertaining to two of Scotland's traditional forms of employment: smuggling and poaching. At times this job put him in mortal danger—gunfights with smugglers—while at others it gave his moral compass a spin.

Chiefly, though, it was an ironic twist in the life of a man thoroughly devoted to democracy, contemptuous of Kirk and King. These sympathies are on display in an early poem like "To a Mouse; On turning her up in her Nest, with the Plough, November, 1785":

Wee, sleekit, cowran, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
                   Wi' bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
                   Wi' murd'ring pattle!

Seamus Heaney has written beautifully about this poem: "Even before a metre or a melody could be established, the word 'wee' put its stressed foot down and in one pre-emptive vocative strike took over the emotional and cultural ground, dispossessing the rights of written standard English and offering asylum to all vernacular comers." Burns had adopted the vernacular from Robert Fergusson and others, and like so many writers of the eighteenth century he loved James MacPherson's Ossian poems of manufactured Gaelic identity. His use of the rhyme-driven "habbie" stanza remains one of his remarkable achievements, but the poem is also rich in sympathy and what I would call a Romantic conviction of our fall from Nature.

In Burns's more satirical mode his dialect may have protected him from comprehension by the English. Once George III had lost the American colonies and the French had embarked on their Reign of Terror, Britain became a police state in which the slightest political sneeze could be interpreted as sedition. As early as 1786, well before the revolution in France, Burns composed "A Dream"—his scathing response to the English monarchy and its minions. He owes a good deal of his popularity even today to this contempt for aristocracy. Dialect is not only a positive sign of cultural identity, but also a way of sticking it to the Man. The Scots had failed to resist English domination, betraying themselves and each other more often than the Irish in their revolts—though both countries retained a resilient tradition of rebellion in language.

Burns also got into trouble, nearly of the mortal variety, due to his eloquence against the King. Lines he scratched on a window of Stirling Castle and other declarations showing sympathy with French revolutionaries got him accused of political disaffection, and while he was not as endangered as the outlaw Thomas Paine he did back down and muzzle himself. His resistance was that of the clown, often retracting what enthusiasm had led him to declare. As "he told ... William Dunbar in Edinburgh, to whom he had long owed a letter; he had simply been 'serving my God by propagating his image, and honoring my king by begetting loyal subjects.'" He was no William Wallace. He was a poet: "The independent-minded man whose sympathies were with the folk he came from, but whose job often distanced him from those very people, was now an employee of the Crown and government at a slave-owning time when democracy was a dangerous word, notes of dissent increasingly suspect, and Scottish independent-mindedness perhaps lost for ever. Burns took the money and sang."

My quotations from Crawford should by now have conveyed some of his dry humor. While the book is not as moving as it might have been, it is certainly authoritative and rewarding. Burns is important not only because of his democratic spirit, but also because of his vitality. Of his more than 630 poems and songs, perhaps none conveys this joie de vivre more successfully than "Tam o' Shanter." Like the letter to William Chalmers quoted earlier in this essay, the poem is not remotely about its paraphrasable content—a drunk's encounter with witches and satanic spirits in the midst of a sort of orgy, and his narrow escape on his trusty horse—but about all the stuff of life outside the confines of moral judgment. "A great carnival of verse," Crawford writes, "it is all the more thrilling because permeated by dark threats at once potentially fatal yet able to be laughed off—as in those supernatural stories Burns had known from childhood." The poem is a romp, resembling novels like Tom Jones in tone, full of the spirits Burns called usquabae and John Barleycorn. Spiced with a knee-slapping parody of moral discourse, it is a mock-ghost story in which "A blethering, blustering, drunken blellum" goes blissfully and breathlessly unpunished for his sins. He is more delighted than terrified when he sees Nannie, a sexy witch wearing only a "cutty sark" (a brief chemise):

     But here my Muse her wing maun cour;
Sic flights are far beyond her pow'r;
To sing how Nannie lap and flang,
(A souple jade she was, and strang),
And how Tam stood, like ane bewitch'd,
And thought his very een enriched....

It is this vision of sexual delight that causes Tam to exclaim "Weel done, Cutty-sark!," setting off the famous chase across the bridge. Tam is saved by his horse, Maggie, resulting in the winking moral: "Whene'er to drink you are inclin'd, / Or cutty-sarks run in your mind, / Think, ye may buy the joys o'er dear, / Remember Tam o' Shanter's mare."

As a child, my wife was given an edition of Burns's poems, including "Tam o' Shanter," as First Prize for "Junior Elocution" by the Kilburnie United Burns Club. The book's sexy illustrations would send some Kansas school boards into a tizzy, only confirming how modern Burns can seem. His death on July 21, 1796 may have been brought on in part by alcohol and exhaustion, but was apparently due to "'an infection of the lining, or the body, or the containing sac of the heart', or else heart-weakening 'bacterial endocarditis'" and the bad advice of doctors. Crawford's account of all this and the "bardie's" posthumous glory is succinct and gripping. While it is a shame the book arrives without maps and illustrations, it succeeds in conveying the complexity and charm of the man as well as the mastery of the poems. For that, readers everywhere should be grateful.

About the Author
David Mason has just won the 2009 Creativity in Motion, Thatcher Hoffman Smith Prize. His memoir, News from the Village, will be published by Red Hen Press in 2010.

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