Robert Burns

Robert Burns (1759–1796) was a Scottish poet born in a two-room cottage in Alloway, Ayrshire, the son of a tenant farmer, and he worked the land himself until his late twenties. The Kilmarnock edition of his Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, published in 1786, made him famous overnight in Edinburgh society, and he spent his remaining years farming unsuccessfully, serving as an excise officer in Dumfries and collecting and rewriting hundreds of songs for Scottish airs, among them Auld Lang Syne and A Red, Red Rose. He died at thirty-seven. His birthday, January 25, is celebrated as Burns Night wherever Scots have settled.