BIOGRAPHY AND PERSONALITY OF A FAMOUS AQUARIUS: ROBERT BURNS

Scotland's national poet, born in Alloway, South Ayrshire, SW Scotland, UK. The son of a poor farmer, his education was thoroughly literary, and he studied the technique of writing, influenced also by the popular tales and songs of Betty Davidson, an old woman who lived with his family. On his father's death (1784) he was left in charge of the farm. At the same time his entanglement with Jean Armour (1767–1834) began, and as the farm went to ruin, his poverty, passion, and despair produced in 1785 an extraordinary output of poetry, including ‘The Jolly Beggars’. Looking for money to emigrate to Jamaica, he published the famous Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (1786), which brought such acclaim that he was persuaded to stay in Scotland. Going to Edinburgh, where he was feted, he began the epistolary flirtations with ‘Clarinda’ (Agnes Maclehose). He collaborated with the musicologists James Johnson and George Thomson in collecting Scottish songs. His own songs, many of which were published in The Scots Musical Museum (1787–1803), include Auld Lang Syne. In 1788 he married Jean Armour and leased a farm near Dumfries, in 1789 being made an excise officer. By 1790, when he wrote ‘Tam o' Shanter’, the farm was failing. He left for Dumfries, briefly adopting Radical views and becoming an ardent supporter of the French Revolution, but he turned patriot again in 1795.