The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography, by Robert Crawford
Robert Burns: A Biography, by Patrick Scott Hogg
How to account for the phenomenon of Robert Burns? Not the man or his poetry, but the national icon, a Caledonian amalgam of Alexander Pushkin and Bob Marley? The process of idolisation began with the instant acclaim that greeted the publication of Burns’ first collection, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, in 1786. That it continues today in this the 250th anniversary of his birth is demonstrated by the publication of two new biographies. But to explain why is harder than it might seem.
Logically Scotland and Burns should have been incompatible. A people hungry for the hard, lasting certainties offered by Calvinist predestination and Enlightenment rationalism should never have identified with a poet devoted to the evanescent moment, to fleeting love, drunken laughter, a cowering mouse, and glimpsed ideals, whose mantra might have been his lines in ‘Tam O’Shanter’:
But pleasures are like poppies spread,
You seize the flower, its bloom is shed;
Or like the snow falls in the river,
A moment white — then melts for ever.
Any life of Burns has to be judged by its ability to make sense of this inherently contradictory embrace.
Both books begin by reminding us of a debt we all share with the poet. ‘My knowledge of modern manners, and of literature and criticism’, Burns once explained, ‘I got from The Spectator.’ He owed this introduction to his father, William, an Ayrshire tenant farmer with a fierce commitment to ‘improvement’, of agriculture and intellect alike. It says much for William’s priorities that though he found the money for the magazine and some years of education for the two older sons, Robert and Gilbert, he was too poor to hire labour.
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