An ill-advised kitchen experiment left me grappling with food poisoning all weekend, so I was prevented from making any sort of Burns Night supper on Sunday. (I’m not Scottish, and have observed this charming custom only once before, but it’s highly recommended—the food part of it, anyway.) I didn’t realize that it was Robert Burns’s two-hundred-fiftieth birthday until I stumbled across this piece, whose author, Hardeep Singh Kohli, “would wager that the overwhelming majority of those who cross their arms and link hands with their companions have little or no inkling that the man behind [“Auld Lang Syne”] was a Scottish Lowland farmer and excise man who died in abject poverty at the tender age of 37.”
Yet you would be forgiven for not knowing it, even as a Scot. Growing up in Glasgow in the Seventies and Eighties, I was barely taught Burns at school. There was the odd poem here and there; a wee bit of “Tam O’Shanter”; a lesson on “My Heart’s in the Highlands”; but there was very little that celebrated the greatness of the man and gave him his rightful place in the pantheon of European literature. I remember my professor of Scottish Literature, the inspirational Rod Lyall, being utterly astonished that by the time we arrived at university we had been more thoroughly schooled in the work of the great Bard of Stratford than in the national Bard of Scotland. He soon put that right.
It was as if the educational establishment in Scotland’s schools was embarrassed by his work. It was fine for us to read the politics of Orwell, to be immersed in the satire of Huxley, or to be asked to appreciate the romance of Tennyson; we were given fully rounded literary educations in almost everything, yet we were never allowed to enjoy the breathtaking breadth of Burns.
Kohli’s brief introduction to Burns is worth a read, as is Eric Felten’s Wall Street Journal piece on why you should never, ever call him “Bobby.”
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