Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) was born in Ayrshire, the first son of a small farmer who paid (just pence, but a fortune to him) to have his sons educated at the parish school. Robert and his brother Gilbert, a year younger, were bright and able from the start. It was Gilbert who was described by John Murdoch, their teacher, as being the more lively and imaginative.
Development of a Poet's Mind
There is no firm evidence that Robert wrote verses from an early age but writing literary and philosophic letters was already a passion by the time he was 21. The impressive scholarship exhibited in those which survive gives the lie to his later sly self-promotion as the 'ploughman poet', but this personification caught the fancy of his new and eager public once the first Kilmarnock Edition of his poetry appeared in 1786.
He was then 27 and rapidly acquiring a reputation with the general public not unlike that of a rising pop idol today.Until then he had been somewhat insulated from national intellectual circles, isolated within the harsh farming circumstances of the day. Hitherto he had depended on chance acquaintances and the reading of current journals and publications to provide his acute mind with stimulus.
