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Robert Burns was born on 25 January 1759 in Alloway, Ayrshire, in a clay cottage built by his father, William Burnes, a gardener and tenant farmer, and his mother, Agnes Broun. He had only a few years of formal schooling, but his father and the tutor John Murdoch gave him a good grounding in English, and he read widely. The family worked a series of poor farms, first Mount Oliphant and then Lochlea, and the heavy labour of his teens left a lasting mark on his health. After his father’s death in 1784, Burns and his brother Gilbert took the farm of Mossgiel, near Mauchline.
In the Mauchline years Burns wrote many of his best-known poems, among them “To a Mouse,” “The Cotter’s Saturday Night,” “Holy Willie’s Prayer,” “Address to the Deil,” and “The Holy Fair.” His affair with Jean Armour, whose father opposed the match, and his failing farm led him to plan emigration to Jamaica. To pay for the passage he published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at Kilmarnock in July 1786. The book was an immediate success, and instead of sailing he went to Edinburgh, where he was celebrated as the “heaven-taught ploughman” and an enlarged Edinburgh edition appeared in 1787.
From 1787 Burns gave much of his energy to Scottish song. He collected, restored, and rewrote hundreds of songs for James Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum and later for George Thomson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs, usually taking no payment. “Auld Lang Syne,” “A Red, Red Rose,” “John Anderson, My Jo,” “Ae Fond Kiss,” “Scots Wha Hae,” and “Ye Banks and Braes o’ Bonie Doon” all come from this work. In 1788 he married Jean Armour and took the farm of Ellisland, near Dumfries, and in 1789 he became an excise officer. At Ellisland he wrote “Tam o’ Shanter” (1790), his great comic narrative poem.
In 1791 Burns gave up farming and moved with his family to Dumfries, where he worked full time in the Excise and kept writing songs, including “A Man’s a Man for A’ That” (1795). His health failed in 1796, and he died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796, at the age of thirty-seven. He is buried in St Michael’s Churchyard, Dumfries. Burns is now honoured as Scotland’s national poet: Burns Night suppers are held on his birthday, 25 January, and “Auld Lang Syne” is sung at New Year across the world.
The poem texts on Poetry Catalog follow the public domain Project Gutenberg edition of Poems and Songs of Robert Burns, arranged by year of composition, so spelling and punctuation keep Burns’s Scots and may differ slightly from other editions. For the linked list of his poems on this site, visit Robert Burns Poems.