Robert Burns' Forgotten Radicalism

There’s a great deal of romance built up around Robert Burns. In the popular imagination, he is the poet-farmer recording the daily life of the merry Scottish peasantry in pithy rhyme. This image is the result of a mighty effort, started during the poet’s lifetime, reduce his body of work from a complex mix of social satire, political commentaries, love poetry, observations of nature, and meditations on mortality to a saccharine portrayal of rural Scottish life. 

Of course, reality is much messier and far more interesting than the sanitized version. Burns spent his childhood working on his family’s struggling farm and did not have much access to formal education in spite of a well-established Scottish school system. His father taught Burns and his six siblings to read and write. Although his poems were popular during his lifetime, Burns saw little financial benefit. As an adult, he continued to work as a farm laborer and earned additional income as a tax collector to support his family and his children from various affairs. There is evidence that Burns lived with bipolar disorder, which may have contributed to his financial instability. 

The political dimension of Burns work was deliberately hidden, and his support for democracy, the abolition of slavery, ecological consciousness, and skepticism of church authority got him in trouble with his superiors during his time with the Board of Excise. This led to him initially publishing some of his works anonymously. He died at age 37 from a heart infection, having written hundreds of poems and songs that have become an integral part of Scottish popular culture. His work, translated into Russian, became popular in Imperial Russia, where Burns was celebrated by early communists as the ‘people’s poet,  has continued to be widely enjoyed in Russia even after the fall of the Soviet Union. 

You can download a copy of his complete works here, or enjoy this playlist.