Robert Burns

Robert Burns was an Ayrshire tenant farmer, failing at it, who published Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect at Kilmarnock in 1786 to raise passage money for Jamaica, and instead was lionised in Edinburgh as the ploughman poet. He collected and rewrote hundreds of Scottish songs, Auld Lang Syne among them, took a post as an exciseman, fathered a dozen children by several women, and died at thirty-seven. He is the national poet of Scotland, toasted every 25 January, and the poet of ordinary life, love and drink in the language the people actually spoke. Wordsworth and Keats learned from him that it could be done.