In Our Time - Robert Burns

Episode Date: October 24, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the work of the man who, in his lifetime, was called The Caledonian Bard and whose fame and influence was to spread around the world. Burns (1759-1796) was born in Ayrshire and his work as a tenant farmer earned him the label The Ploughman Poet, yet it was the quality of his verse that helped his reputation endure and grow. His work inspired other Romantic poets and his personal story and ideas combined with that, giving his poems a broad strength and appeal - sung by revolutionaries and on Mao's Long March, as well as on New Year's Eve and at Burns Suppers.WithRobert Crawford Professor of Modern Scottish Literature and Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St AndrewsFiona Stafford Professor of English at the University of Oxfordand Murray Pittock Bradley Professor of English Literature and Pro Vice Principal at the University of GlasgowProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programmes if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in 1786, Robert Burns had a collection of his verse published. It was Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, and it made him famous. He'd been a struggling tenant farmer on the point of emigration,

yet was now celebrated as Caledonius Bard, the Heaven-Tought Ploughman, and his reputation spread around the world. English romantic poets made pilgrimages to his cottage, his songs were sung by revolutionaries in Germany and China, and All Lang Zine has become an international anthem at New Year. Win me to discuss Robert Burns are Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews,

Fiona Stafford, Professor of English at the University of Oxford, and Murray Pittock, Bradley Professor of English Literature and Proven vice principal at the University of Glasgow. Murray Pito, what was Robert Burns' early life like? Well, Burns grew up in poverty because his farmer, who was effectively a landscape gardener, had become a farmer and couldn't really make his farm's work. And he spent a good deal of his teenage years laboring on his father's farm, being really the source of labour.

And then a very dispiriting time in his early 20s when his father's, His father was being sued for back rent payments, which almost brought the family to penury. But he did, his father who was often impressed his contemporaries, especially his contemporaries of higher social rank, tried very hard to give Robert Burns and education, in particularly the influence both in tutoring and at his school of John Murdoch was important. and John Murdoch, who taught Burns for a relatively brief time formally, but he remained a contact and in touch with Burns at a later period when Burns was a teenager. And so Burns devoured books at an early age, but he had very few of them, and yet by his early mid-20s he is described as having a large library.

And en route, he certainly acquired some facility in French. He tried and failed many times to learn Latin, and as my colleague Nigel Wieske has recently demonstrated, he actually made a stab at Greek in his later life. So this is in Asher. Was there the land that his father tried to farm? Was it particularly difficult land? It probably was not great land at any of the farms.

But I think that it's probably the case that William Burns was not a great farmer, and it's probably a barnest, I should say, and probably the case that Robert was not a particularly great farmer either because sometimes he chose rather, he didn't choose the first farm he saw, he sometimes turned down farms, but he often did choose farms that other people might have turned down a way he's going to anticipate problem, as a tenant farmer, yes. You mentioned murder, could you tell us a bit more about him, who taught him?

Not every day, he was hired for a little while and so on, but he obviously was an educative influence. He was, he was a graduate, an edictive. an educated man and appears to that, though I think the detailed documentary evidence is lacking really a very close relationship with Bourne. Certainly he spends, he crops up a lot in Barnes-Zarla life. He was called Heaven-Tought Plowman,

and much was made of his from the earth, earthy, very almost peasant, like they would have said, in what we used to call Europe. How true was that when he was in his, by the time, he was in his mid-20s? You mentioned that he'd got to be, a decent-sized library by then? He had.

He always had problems with finance, but they were to some extent structural. What does that mean? Well, when he was getting the subscribers, or his friends were getting the subscribers together for the Kilmarnock edition of poems,

his putative father-in-law, Armour, was going to sue him for for what he now thought Barnes had a significant amount of money and Burns put all his family assets into his brother Gilbert's name and keeping

and it was not the last time he supported Gilbert so in the end by the although he had a good salary every year in the 1790s in particular it was about 40% or 50% more than Jane Austen enjoyed as an annual income in 1805 he nonetheless could only get himself

onto a strong financial footing long term by breaking his brother Gilbert, which he absolutely declined to do. Thank you. Fiona Stappert locally, before he became known as a poet, he caused a Sir Overs' relationship with several women. What do we know about that? Well, we know a little bit about what he says himself. So when he is writing an autobiographical letter, he describes how love and poetry began together, and he tells the story about one of the plus sides of being on the farm, I think, was when he was working on the harvest age 15, and by his side was a very attractive 14-year-old.

And he had worked out that in order to perhaps get some tender feelings from his co-worker, he could try a poem or a song. So he makes no secret of that. In fact, he's rather proud of it. But we also know that not much later than that, He had a relationship with Elizabeth Patton, a servant girl, and she became pregnant by him. And there was a scandal about that. He had to answer for that in the Kirk.

He didn't marry Elizabeth. By the time she had her baby, he was already interested in Jean Arma, who also became pregnant by him quite quickly. He also had a complication with Mary Campbell. we don't know quite what happened there. It's possible she was pregnant as well. So he was one of these obviously very attractive men who didn't really go in for either or if there were plenty of opportunities. And he had quite a lot of children?

He had quite a lot of children. Can you fill out that rather prim remark of mine? Well, Jean Arma, who became his wife, quite a brave woman, she had nine children. She did say he should have had two wives, She did, yes. I think that was a bit of an understatement, actually. And then he had several other children as well. Elizabeth Patton definitely had a baby.

There was a woman in Edinburgh, Jenny Clough, who seems to have had one of his babies. And quite a bit later in Dunfries and Park had a baby by Robert Burns as well. And did his wife Jane have nine children? Yes. So it totted up to quite a few. I read from what you've written and from I've read elsewhere that he tried his best to look after them rather unusually. Yes, exactly.

He did feel concerned about his children and he did want to maintain them but it didn't mean he necessarily wanted to be married to the mother so maintaining the children didn't necessarily go with making the mother respectable, which at that time was obviously quite complicated. For one or two of these misdeeds, he was made to do public penance in church.

Now, what was his relationship with church? And what form did the public penance take? He had to go and sit on the cutty stool. No what? The cutty stall, a small stool, and be reprimanded publicly in church, which he did not think much of. Which church is this?

Which one? Which nomination are we talking about? Presbyterian. Yes, Presbyterian, Kirk. And I think he went, he went through that experience and so did some of his friends as well and it tended to inspire satire

on the Kirk actually that's how he reacted to it I'm sorry. I was going to say a poem like Holy Willis Prayer which he didn't publish as part of the poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect was inspired partly by one of his friends having that experience and Holy Willis prayers Holy Willey is saying can you finish all that off?

Well Holy Holy Holy Holy Willey is supposed confessing to the Lord and saying his prayers and hoping that he's going to be one of the saved, which he assumes he is, which means that his own little misdemeanors in this direction are obviously going to be forgiven. So Burns is pointing out the hypocrisy of the church elders, really, in that poem. But it's very funny, so it's definitely a satirical poem.

But organised religion was something that he veered away from quite early on and stayed away from all. Could you be called religious in any way? Well, I think he was, and I think it did have an effect. I think he would definitely be seen as moderate in his religion. He didn't agree with the kind of extreme Calvinism at the time, but I don't think that meant he was completely without any religious feeling. Do we have evidence for that?

I don't think we have hard evidence, but I think in some of his poems you get a sense of it. But I think he's more comfortable writing about the deal than about God. about the level and about God. If he keeps missing out the V. Yes, he does. And that's God, that's dialect. We're coming to that. Robert Crawford,

it was a very difficult existence to be a farmer in the north, anywhere. And so it was punishing physically, and that stayed with him, didn't it? That had an impact in him. How did he manage to go, and it was exhausting, so how did he get the energy to,

well, to writing, that obviously flowed through him, but to get published, to enter into all the business of that, How did he get going? Well, his poems were circulating, I think, both orally and in manuscript before he published his first book. He came not just from a textual culture, but particularly from his mother's side, from an oral culture. She was a great singer of songs.

When he writes about her, she's often singing. There was an old relative of his mothers who also lived in the house who had a huge store of folk tales and songs as well. And those fed into the poems that Burns is making in the early. 1780s. So they're circulating among friends in manuscript. He gets a reputation as a wit. And then in... Reputation were? Locally. In Ayrshire in the west of Scotland.

So we're talking about which area, Kilmarnock area? Round about air, round about the farms that he's living on, which are outside air. Then his first book is published by subscription in Kilmarnock in 1786. In an edition of about 600. half the copies are subscribed for in advance, his family, his friends and himself, they're all gathering subscriptions. Burns is a great networker, not least because he's a Freemason, so he uses Masonic networks as well.

The book comes out, and it's a hit locally. It's not just a hit locally, but a few copies circulate more widely. The book reaches Edinburgh. Burns, and this is the hardest thing, I think, for us to deal with in our time, is on the point of emigrating to Jamaica to work on a slave plantation. Why do you want to do that? To make money and to get the hell out

from Jean Armour's relatives. He's in trouble. He has so often in his life, woman trouble. He seems reluctant in some ways to go to Jamaica. He misses the boat several times and ultimately instead of sailing to the New World, he rides across Scotland to the New World

of Edinburgh, where there's a chance his poems can have another edition. That edition comes out, 3,000 copies now, so about five times the size of the Kilnarnock edition, and it's a big hit. It's a big hit socially. Burns suddenly is the man you want at your party if you're in Edinburgh socialite.

So he has made it then. Is there any way to summarise why that impact was so big at the time? I think it's bound up with the charisma people felt he had as an individual. Walter Scott, who only met him once, talks about the brightness of his eyes. A lot of people testify to that. You can hear an acoustic equivalent of that brightness in the poetry.

It's jaunty, it's lively, it winks, there's a kick of mischief to it, there's a whisper of mischief to it. The very first poem in his first book is called The Twah Dogs, and as its title suggests about two dogs, the subtitle is a tale. Is that a joke? I think it is. And Burns goes on making jokes throughout this book. One of his most famous poems is set in church. It begins with the sound, ha! exclamation mark,

which is a bit like sneezing in church or maybe more laughing in church. That's the poem to a louse. So there's a vein of humour runs right the way through, although the poems may also be about ruin, about despondency, about love. There's tremendous range to them. Was there a sense of patronage, your surprise in the idea that he was a heaven-sent ploughman?

Yes, he was patted on the head a little. Henry Mackenzie, Edinburgh, a lawyer, who uses that phrase of him. He uses it to encourage him, but also, I think, just a wee bit to talk down to him. Nonetheless, Burns encourages this notion that he is a ploughman poet, a kind of people's poet,

a bard, a word he loved. I would take a slightly different view of the McKenzie review in the lounger, which is that McKenzie uses the term a ploughman poet directly after he's made a comparison between Burns and Shakespeare, a comparison which immediately says he doesn't mean to have made. And then later on he talks about Burns Woodnotes Wild, which actually Burns uses as a motto on his coat of arms later. But that reference Woodnotes Wilde is a reference to the depiction

of Shakespeare in Milton's La Legreau, Swedish Shakespeare, Fancy's child, warbling his native woodnotes wild. Lalegrero was a highly fashionable poem in the late 18th century. What McKenzie is doing, I think, is actually portraying Burns as an equivalent to the unlettered nature's child of Shakespeare and making him for the first time a Scottish equivalent of Shakespeare. Can I get to the poetry now?

Let's start with To the Mouse. There's a big contrast between, mean the first let us call it stanza and the second sentence. Now could you read the first stanza the way he would have read it and it would have been heard then? There's a book. Now who can read it best? There's the first answer.

We slick at cowering timorous beastie. Oh, what a panic's in thy bristie. Now needn't us start away so hasty with bickering brattle. I would be leith to run and chase thee with murder and pattle. And then it switches to in the second of us is

Enlightenment English. It certainly is. Do you want to do that? And truly sorry, man's dominion, has broken nature's social union and justifies that ill opinion which makes thee startle at me,

thy poor earthbound companion and fellow mortal. So is that a clue, a good clue, to the way he mixes up his different languages? Can I have my book back, please? It certainly is, but

he does it for many, for different thematic reasons. He does, as a much more recent comment, would put it, he does the police in different voices. He creates different voicings to create different perspectives. And what he's

doing there is that the enlightened voice is a Smithian, a Smith Smith perspective. Smith's, Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments is very influential on Burns. But one of the things that Smith argues is that ultimately, language will have to

be standardized in order for commerce and trade to be international and what Barnes is doing is intensely localising language so that he actually puts, what he's doing into Amos is putting Smithian sympathy in the context of

an Ayrshire farmer's perception. And he's also localising his subject matter. I mean, aren't many poems written to a mouse and out of it he gets a line which is quoted at the Genenegger Best Layed Plans of Mice and Meng off de Gleigh and on it go, Steinbeck takes it up and it's quoted, I presume, all over the place, all the time.

So he brings that out of a close-up of a mouse. He then turns his attention, I don't know, the order of this, this might have been first, to a louse, Fiona Stafford. Now, what does he get out of the louse? Well, in a way, I think a louse is an even less likely a dressee than a mouse, and I think he's very fond of playing on people's conventional expectations and their sense of a creature that is somehow vermin or hideous or undesirable in some way.

And the poem begins with playing on that because it's a louse that he's seen on a young lady's bonnet in the church. And I think everybody reading that has a little shudder imagining this louse creeping across your bonnet. So why is he doing that? I mean, it's a wonderful poem.

And again, he gives us a great line. Oh, Woodson. I'm going to have to say this. Woodson power. the gifted gears to see ourselves as others see us. That's right. And that's very Adam Smithian. That's a straights...

Adam Smith's wealth of nations are at the same time, yeah. That's a straight Scots versification of a little passage from Adam Smith's theory of moral sentiments, a book of philosophy that had been published in the year of Burns's birth. So that's a hint as just to how well-read and well-educated Burns is. But it's also a hint as to how easily he can move between English lines. and what he calls the Scottish dialect. But I think it's also a joke on himself because it sounds very authoritative

because it is an allusion to Adam Smith, who's a very kind of dominant moral philosopher at the time. But I think that this is one of the reasons I like Boyne so much, is that he's often self-mocking. So the poem appears to be making fun of this young woman who's got her new bonnet, is looking very proud of herself. But actually, as it goes on, you realise, that Burns is making fun of himself

because there he is in church and he's much more interested in the ladies bonnet and the lad. So that idea of, could you see yourself as other people see you, is a joke as much, I think, on the speaker as it is on Jenny. And it's also a poem of immensely complicated register because as well as that end, the English,

he uses both south-western Scottish and north-eastern Scottish dialect. So, for example, Flanin in the north-east is a compound that he's, used to describe eating and food stuffs. So this is food stuff for the louse. But in the southwest, I mean, literally it's the flannel cap a woman wears, but it's also slang for the female genitalia. So the poem is both about sex and about greed

at the one time, depending how you read the two different elements of Scots dialect. Can we go broader, if we can, I mean, I'm slightly broader than a louse and a mouse, Robert Krovet. What is his relationship with the natural world in his poetry? What could we say about that? Well, he's a farmer poet. And he'll talk to anyone.

He'll talk to a lord. He'll talk to a louse. And that sense of switching tone and yet remaining, in a sense, someone who speaks with a democratic voice is absolutely essential to Burns. Can you give us an example of that? I mean, he has a good old cursed lords. Burns hymns what he calls the royalty of man. Burns' ideal is the man o independent mind

who looks and laughs at all that and by all that in that particular song he means lords and honours and emblems of hierarchy they don't matter to Burns what matters to Burns is the nature of the particular addressee in front of him be it a louse or a lady or a mouse or a man

But in terms of the natural world, the rivers of Scotland, he wants to make the rivers of Ayrshire as famous as the Thames. Yes, he wants to sing his locality. And he does love rivers, flow gently sweet afton. He likes wandering up river banks. He likes that kind of scenery of gentle hills and wooded glens that you find in the Ayrshire he grew up in. He also likes highland scenery. He likes mountains and snow. and yet only up to a point.

People often say Burns grew up particularly in one of the farms he lived in when he was young, looking right across to the very noble mountains of Aron, which later entranced Wordsworth when Wordsworth visited. Robert Burns never mentions them. He has a farmer's sense of the land, I think, and of the creatures on the land. One of his breakthrough poems is spoken by a dying sheep.

He likes different voice. voices. He likes speaking to animals and sometimes he likes it when the animals speak back. So he has a farmer's sense of nature's social union rather than simply a kind of touristic gaze. However much later in his life he may go on Highland and Lowland Tours. Just coming in on that point, I think he's quite an unusual farmer that he is sympathetic to a mouse. That seems to me not the typical farmer's attitude, especially not. if he's busy ploughing and he happens to turn over a mouse and her nest, I think, to be honest, quite a lot of farmers would probably just keep going on with the work.

So I agree with you up to a point, but I think he's quite an unusual farmer in some ways. That's an absolutely fair point. What he's doing with that mouse, though, is he's using it as an emblem of what we might now call habitat loss, but he's also thinking about the fact that his own family may be put out of their farm. It's a poem written just after one of his brothers has died as a teenager. So although sometimes people might want to think of To a Mouse with its wee sleek at Cowran Timuris Beasty as almost a Disney-type, cute poem, it's actually a poem fearful of ruin and eviction. And it's quite a dark poem.

Yes, and he emphasizes with that fear himself, doesn't he? But coming to you, Murray, he wrote songs, a lot of songs. Can you tell us, I know there's so many, can you tell us how, did they come easily to him, who provided the music, what happened? Well, Borne spent most of the latter part of his career with some big set-piece exceptions like Tamashanta writing or editing songs.

So when he's in Edinburgh, he's introduced to James Johnson, who's just about brought out the first volume of the Scots Musical Museum as it's called, which Burns contributes a couple of songs to notably Green Grow their Asheso. And then Barnes subsequently co-edits and starts to write prefaces for the next four volumes. And the last one, the sixth volume, appears after Burns dies, which is brought out by Johnson. So we attributed 100 of those songs to Barnes, eventually it's 250, probably.

150 to 200 are mostly by Barnes. What he does typically is he gets a traditional song and he edits it, sometimes very significantly. He improves it, sometimes very significantly, sometimes to more limited extent. The tunes are provided by the Episcopalian organist of St. Patrick's Trutch in the Cowgate, but mostly from earlier 18th century collections.

Where did Olaan Zine and my love is like a red red rose come from? Well, Oll Langsine is 17th century, some 16th century element. Did he find the words? He found a large number of the words. Why so found? You mean they were already written and he took them up? He took up a significant portion of what we now know as O'Lang Sin from pre-existing versions, which is one of the reasons.

It's a poem in the 18th, the song in the 18th century of Jacobite exile, which is why Seas Betweeners, Braid A Roar, for example, survives in Burns's version. In terms of my love is like a red, red rose, I think Robert might want to word here because Robert thinks that, Robert, I think, thinks that that poem derives from Burns' relationship with James Hutton, and I think it's more, there is more traditional elements again that Burns is picking out there. What he does is he perfects the elements that he finds. But he's not actually particularly musical.

There is a weakness in some of the tunes, and they're sustained by early 18th century collections. Browns is not that musical. He can do a little bit, but he can't really edit music beyond. The lines are musical, aren't there? My love is like a red-red rose. It's newly sprung in June. The dance is like a brown.

And so and so forth. I think he has a great ear, but by all accounts he wasn't a great singer. So he wasn't formally musical, but he has a poet's ear for language. And that lets him recast, remake songs. So that sometimes it's quite difficult to tell how much of the song pre-existed burns and how much of it is burns. You might say, oh, he's a plagiarist then. But actually, no, he's able through recasting these songs to fuse his voice with the voice of traditional songs. song. If you think of a song like

A fond kiss, his famous song of parting, A fond kiss and then we sever. A fair wheel, and then forever. Now, the earlier version of that song has the verb sever in it, but it's hidden away in the middle of a line. Burns takes it and makes it the end, the rhyme word in the first line, and that sense of severance is therefore

intensified. He had a genius for taking earlier material and remaking it with with Phineas. Fiona, so he's there in Edinburgh, the toast of the town, a celebrity in his own lifetime with that book out and taken up here there and everywhere.

And is it then that he is developing, is he developing his poetry? Is this when he comes to write Tamashanta? And how important is that? He writes Tamashanta a little bit later. I think when he's in Edinburgh, he is wanting to expand his addition. But I think he's also rather overcome

by the expectation, I think having had such an unexpected massive success, and I think coming from the background that Murray's described to find himself fated by all the great men of Edinburgh and have young Walter Scott sort of sitting at his feet at these literary salons, I think actually it was quite overwhelming for him. He writes to one of his friends saying that he feels that the expectation is beyond his powers. And he looks into it. the future down as he would into a bottomless pit. He writes in one of his letters from Edinburgh. So I think

actually, although he's very excited by all the success, there's something quite intimidating about it as well. So he comes to Tamashanta a bit later, but it'd be useful to pause and have a look at Tamashanta now. So tell us about Tamashanta, please.

Well, Tamashanta I think is really interesting because it is rather different in character from the poems that have made him so famous and successful. There's nothing really like Tamashanta in poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect. So Tamashanta is a witch's tale. It's a fusion of different local folk tales, probably. And it's quite a longish, by Burns & Sanders' narrative poem.

He writes it in rhyming tetrameter couplets, and it runs on and on. And it has this sort of jaunty, gallop-y atmosphere. Gallup because he's on a horse. He's got drunk in a pub with pals and in a dark night, left his wife at home, night night drunk goes out on the horse and comes across a witch's coven

and he's very excited because he likes to look at the witches. Then they turn on him. That's it in a nutshell. And he flees. Yeah, he says it at much greater length. That is absolutely what happens. So what was the strength of it? Why did he take on?

Well, I think partly because it's so funny, partly because it is so well written and well composed, partly because I think people just get drawn into it and it is very unclear because he is so drunk exactly what he's seeing and I think the whole kind of idea of riding home on your own in a terrible storm

seeing the ruined church lit up which you know is haunted anyway and then do you go and have a look of course he does and then what he sees is very intriguing and you get drawn in and the narrator of Tamashanta is quite viaristic so he's encouraging the readers

also to be really interested in what's in the church. And what's in the church is quite horrific. It's presented in this comic way because the rhythm's so jaunty. But actually what he sees is old Nick playing his pipes and this dance of witches and warlocks with all the coffins standing open. So it is quite a horrific scene. And the idea that Tam is really just interested in the most attractive of the witches who's wearing a dress that's too short for, I get so excited that he cannot keep quiet. And he eventually shouts out famously, well done cutty sock, which means well done, very

short dress, and in an instant all was dark. Robert Crawford, it's often said that he's got a democratic voice. Is that true? And how could you illustrate it if it is true? I think it is true. I think it comes, as I was saying earlier, from the way he talks

to anybody in the same tone. The way he sings, what he calls, the royalty of man, that's in a poem addressed to George Washington, he seems to be pretty sympathetic towards the American Revolution and I think towards aspects of the French Revolution as well. We can call him a poet of a markedly democratic voice, but it's important to remember, first of all, he couldn't vote. Most people in his airshire had no vote. And secondly, that the word democracy,

especially in the 1790s, was a very dirty word in Britain. So Burns doesn't use. use the word democracy, I think, anywhere in his poetry. And yet what we hear repeatedly is this democratic tone of address and this celebration of what we would hear as a democratic voice. Full of brothers be together and friends will be together. Man to man the world or shall brothers be for all that. Yes. That sense of... That's in a man's amount.

That's what poverty is. Yes. Yes. And Burns, you can hear sometimes. echoes of French revolutionary song in Burns, for instance. Are they echoing him or is he echoing them? No, he's echoing them, I think.

Murray, Murray, so let's continue this revolutionary strain. How much evidence is there for the fact, for him being a revolutionary? I think the evidence is not that strong. I think there's a clear evidence

that he's sympathetic to the American revolution and that he uses, for example, in the rights of women, the Sa'Iera from the French revolutionary lexicon. He's a bit concerned that he'll be investigated for revolutionary inclinations in the 1792-3, and that's headed off at the past. But there still isn't a lot,

there really isn't a lot there because he's also joined the Company of Archers in 1792, who he also writes, who shall not sing, God say the king shall hang as high as the steeple. He does say, don't forget the people, but forgetting the people is, I think, in my view, hardly necessarily

a full-scale democratic commitment. He does think about joining the army and fighting for George III in the Americas at times. So I think the key to Barnes, the reason that he's appealed, in that sense, moving from the revolutionary to the, international sphere of Barnes across the world is because it's to be found in an orly poem of his about his relationships to women. His feeling hurt but acts apart. They're easy prey for Rabmoskiel.

The feeling hurt is always acting apart. It's got a voice which can be listing and going for a soldier. It's got a voice which can be sympathetic to revolution or all the rights of women. It's a voice that condemns slavery and it's a man that considers going to work in a plantation in Jamaica. he's a slippery character. If you know what happened, you mentioned earlier the impact of celebrity. He was a drinker anyway, but he really turned to alcohol here.

Yeah, I think he always enjoyed a drink. I don't think there's any doubt about that, and lots of his famous poems are about Scottish drink or whatever. But I think he did drink more and more without a doubt. And I think that would be a way of interpreting that that he was finding life actually rather unmanageable, partly because of his fame,

partly because of all these babies we were talking about earlier. And the debt? Yes, and exactly. His brother's debt that he was on his shoulders. He's in financial difficulty as well. So he has a lot of pressure on him. And I think that was one of the contributory factors for him drinking. Robert.

Two other things maybe to add to that would be he seems to have had a depressive streak. He had a kind of. of breakdown when he was about 21. And although it's hard to diagnose this from a 21st century point of view, the word Burns uses of it is hypochondria. He doesn't mean by that imagining illnesses. He means closer, I think, to something that was called hypochondriasis in the 18th century and was often connected both with stomach problems and with low spirits. And these kind of depressive episodes recur, in which case the worst thing you could do is take more drink. But I think he's also

under kinds of pressure at the end of his life, coming from the fact that he's a servant of the Crown, he's working as an excise man by the 1790s, and yet the last long conversation with Burns to be written down describes him and a friend as staunch Republicans. So there seems to be a clash between perhaps some views, at least that he expresses in private and that may come into some of his poems and other poems where he's asserting, apparently a fierce loyalty to the crown and is frightened, I think, about being taken to task

for opinions that would not be appropriate to a civil servant. He is playing the part, as you said, Murray. He's going to run a slave in campaign, plays his next-sized man, he's a farmer in the field, and so on. He's not quite a chameleon poet, as Keats argued poet should be,

but he's certainly often self-dramatising, and he will dramatise one mood, one position, and then another mood, another position. In the same way as, although we think of him as a great singer of male love songs, he also writes songs from a woman's perspective. So he's an imaginative artist.

He enters into various kinds of being, tonality and mood. I think it's fair to say that in terms of his private views, he makes slight disagree on an emphasis, Robert, that he also is very pleased to say, tonight I dine with a lord after having dinner with Lord Dare. So he's very capable of expressing Republican sentiments to what might be sympathetic ears,

but he's equally capable of sounding like rather a snob. So I think the question for Burns is, the man of independent mind is also a man who has got, who sets himself above the coward slave, and he's very, to quote from a man's a man for all that, and I think he's very well aware of that in himself. Fiona. Yeah, so I was just going to go back to Murray's reading of the Heaven Talk Plowman, actually, and that comparison with Shakespeare, because that's partly what McKenzie's putting his finger on, isn't it, that Burns does have this ability to adopt different voices and different,

roles. And I think one of the difficulties is that even when he's writing letters, which are obviously a major biographical source, he's adopting different voices depending on who he's writing to. So I think he's very aware of different audiences and of not necessarily being pinned down to a particular position. Sorry, Robert, can we come we towards the inner? Did, was his reputation, he woke up almost like Ryan to find himself famous? Did his reputation, was it lower? He died and he was Did he stay steady or did it grow? What's going on there?

It grows among not least the English romantic poets. Keats, Wordsworth and others make pilgrimages to the Burns country. Wordsworth was very taken. Wordsworth reads Burns when he Wordsworth is young. And Wordsworth's notion of writing in a selection of the language really used by men is very Bernzian. Except Wordsworth seems to comb the dialect out of his. poetry, you know, if only Wordsworth hadn't gone to Cambridge, he might

still have written in Cumbrian dialogue. That would have been the same, wouldn't you? Life would have been entirely different. And Burns, by the same chads, might have been ruined by going to university. We can't tell that. But he certainly makes a big impact on the generation of poets after him.

And he goes on making an impact, not least in America. Whitman is fascinated by Burns. Whitman again, a poet who wants to have a kind of bardic voice. Doesn't sound like Burns, but recognises the Bardic element in Burns. So he's moved to America, Murray, and he's

getting translated all over the world. And then he becomes very important in China, Russia, Germany, on it goes. Yes, I mean, he's first translated before his death into German in 1795, though I don't think he was aware of that.

And the translation by France Freiligra, a man's a man for all that, Trots Allerame, becomes the key song of the 18 1948 revolution and in a slightly altered form remains a song of the German left from 1918 to the present day

so that song is almost as almost as common on YouTube and other platforms as the original Man's a Man And in the Long March they sang Indeed Which was the one they sang there? My heart's in the highlands My hearts in the highlands

But and he was Certainly both in China He was used in the Cultural Revolution Because he was the example of an intellectual who could stay on the land. And in Russia, he was used as an example by Stalin's translator Samuel Marshaq of the good Kulak, the Kulak who didn't want to just amass wealth and money, but was happy for honest poverty and independence of mind.

Finally, Fiona, how did he need into the growth of the romantic poets and NAM movement? They went up to his cottage in numbers, and so they touched the grail as it were. They certainly did. And it was the, all the kind of famous romantic poets we can think of were influenced by Burns. So, Wordsworth and Coleridge. But also Dorothy Wordsworth was very taken with Burns. She was laughing about to allow us in 1787 straight away.

And Keats. And Keats, yes, Keats, Keats went on a pilgrimage and he tried to write a poem in Burns' cottage and was very unhappy with his performance. So Burns had obviously produced a great anxiety of influence. influence in Keats. But you find Jane Austen obviously very familiar with Burns, which is another thing that surprises people. Well, thank you very much. Thank you for you and Estafford, Robert Crawford and Murray Pittick. All suggestions for our listener week by tomorrow 25th of October. Please. Next week, it's hybrids when two species cross and make a different entity as part of the constant motion of

evolution. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. I could say a wee bit more about his legacy to the present and to more recent poetry. Yeah, that's right. Do you want to say that? Please, the mic's open. I think Burns has an astonishing range of afterlives.

Shostakovich during the siege of Leningrad set one of Burns'est's most moving songs Oh, wert thou in the cold blast. Burns has a huge range of afterlives in classical music, though he's associated right. with folk music. But in modern poetry as well, he's a living

force in the work of Seamus Heaney who wrote a lot of verse letters in the Burns stanza grew up listening to Burns and I suppose as someone who identified with a farming community where a form of Scots was spoken

was drawn to Burns. But a rather different poet, Les Murray in Australia, also grew up listening to Burns, had a deep love of Burns. And if you think of Les Murray as in some ways an Australian bard, well, there are similarities between his stance and some of Burns' attitudes. Maya Angelou grew up having a very moving encounter with Burns' work. Despite the fact, as we were saying earlier that Burns nearly went to work on a slave plantation, nonetheless, his was a voice that spoke to her,

a voice of the people, a democratic voice. In contemporary Scottish poetry, in Kathleen Jamie, in Don Patterson, who has edited Burns' work, and in others in Liz Lockhead, in Douglas Dunn, in WN Herbert, you will hear the Burns stanza, you will hear allusions to Burns. So there's a sense in which Burns has just never gone away. Well, that's the most comprehensive answer

that question I've ever had. And thank God this is being recorded, and it'll whiz around the world. for the next forever really. I was... Terrific, thank you. I was thinking of Don Paterson actually.

Right. I was going to say... I was going to say, I'm very glad to raise that because of the the impact in Beethoven, Hayden, Ravelle,

Mendelssohn and down to Ariboupert is huge and that's... But I wanted to mention the supper. Because the Burns Supper. Ah, the Burns Supper. Because the Burns Supper

is actually a unique event in terms of literary celebration. They're now about nine and a half million people attending registered Burns suppers worldwide. Do they all pipe in the haggis? They nearly all do, but not all of them are police. There's usually an inflection from local national culture into the supper.

But because the poetry is always recited, because the songs are always sung, it's an enormously important part of dissemination. It is in some countries the only element of Scottish culture that people actually see is the Burns' the Burns Supper. And originally, put together in 1801, it seems to have had a relationship to Fox suppers. They were quite widespread there. Nelson suppers, which took off for a bit and then faded away. Fox suppers were the day before the 25th of January on the wig politician Charles James Fox.

And given what Robert said about Burns' democratic voice and reputation, the fact that Fox suppers migrated into Burns' in the first quarter of the 19th century is quite interesting. But the fact is that today it's at an enormous scale with great PR like the highest Burn's Supper in the world, which was done but first of all by B.OAC

at 11,000 metres in 1961 and then by the late Andrew Farley on Kilimanjaro for the 250th anniversary of Barnes'rath in 2009. So I am a devotee of the International Barnes Supper. So you land is going to London in space before. Absolutely. But Burns in orbit is the next stop.

Yeah, this needs to be counterbalanced by the lowest Burns' supper. Yeah. Well, I think I'd go back to the late 18th century, actually, on this point. Not about Burns' supper so much, but I actually talk a little bit about his importance for people who felt that their own regional dialect wasn't acceptable. I think Burns is hugely important in that way. and I think that's part of his appeal in Ireland. But someone like Robert Anderson, the Cumbrian poet, is really, really affected by Burns. He's contemporary of Wordsworth, isn't it?

Yes, that's right. Yeah, Wordsworth subscribes to one of his collections. And I think the success of Burns, although in some way some of the kind of reception was a little bit double-edged, just gives an enormous kind of boost. It says, okay, you don't need to speak standard English, you don't need to write standard English, in order to publish great poetry.

and I think that's terribly important and I think that had a kind of very inspiring effect not just on the famous romantic poets but on lots and lots of others as well and on women. Anyone who's kind of slightly out of the sort of establishment

is given a kind of free pass by Burns. One second, but at the very beginning of the programme he wanted both, didn't he, from the mouse, he wanted his wee slicket and then he wanted enlightenment language to follow immediately. He wanted the both.

He always wanted that scale of audience but actually what Fiona says is directly and true in terms of his use by Czech language activists in terms of his use to rehabilitate Swiss-German and also in his development, Henrik Vergelen's development of Standard Norwegian in the early 19th century. But like many romantic writers, he had a huge impact on romantic nation-building

and articulations of the national self-through language. Yes, that apparently simple title of his first and in a sense his only book, poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect is actually quite complicated. Chiefly in the Scottish dialect, meaning I'm going to use English sometimes too and whenever I like, but chiefly in the Scottish dialect carries a language politics with it. At a time where people in Scotland, particularly people like me, university professors were saying write in proper standard English, Burns publishes poems chiefly in the Scottish dialect. and that championing of speak how you like, speak the way you were brought up to speak,

is something that goes on resonating in Tony Harrison, in James Kelman and in later writers. That must have been bold of him at the time then. He wants to make his name as a poet and he starts off with the dialect and it's mostly the dialect. Does he put the bits of Enlightenment English in just to say, I can do this as well if I want to? No, I think he has access to that. Well, no, no. I was going to say yes. It's not just a kind of showing off.

It's wanting to use the whole spectrum of the language to which he has access to be fully a poet. But you think he's doing it to show them he can do it if he wants? I think there's a strong element to that because he's presenting himself as the simple bard, isn't he? But he's revealing that he's read Adam Smith, that he can write in that if he wishes to. But I think he establishes himself as a sophisticate

by challenging the language that he utilizes by the language that he grew up with. And that's the sweet spot where he demonstrates that he is actually intellectually capable in all these spheres. He uses just over 2,000 words of Scots and about 75 words of Gallic too. But he has also a very large English vocabulary.

It's very much up with and indeed beyond Milton's 8,000 words used. Really? So it's very strikingly wide. range of language use that he's got to cover all these voices, but within them all, to control and to establish his own superiority among and over the ideas of his own time as well as the feelings, and to be, as he is, so incredibly elusive, as well as allusive and comprehensively accessible throughout the world.

In fact, what you said in the programme about him, when he was this, this, it was, If he wasn't a chameleon, he was nearly a chameo. And if he wasn't a chameleon and like a chameleon, how would you describe it, Robert? I think he dances through language. He's very, very articulate, and he was physically a great dancer. He's astonishingly nimble the way he moves through language and the way he makes language dance. One of my favourite lines is the line that describes the dancers in Tamashanta. they set, they reeled, they set, they crossed, they click it,

burns nose and understands dancing, he understands rhythm. And you can hear that throughout his poetry, whether it's sung or whether it's read. Fiona, were you about to add to that? No, I was only going to just say that obviously in order to be a poet, you have to go to dancing classes first, which wasn't going to add anything to the greatest something of things. I think it added a lot. It's the most illuminating remarks. We've heard the last five seconds.

So I apologize for that. Well, that was a cracker. Thank you all very much. The producer can't wait to get in and make the offer of the week to you. Not all. So you want to tea or coffee. Yeah? Tea?

Yes, please. Two beloved. Thanks very much. Thank you. I love a coffee, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Hi, I'm Alistair, and I want to tell you about the way I see it,

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