Robert Burns was born in a thatched clay cottage at Alloway on the 25th of January, 1759, the eldest of seven children of a tenant farmer. His short life spanned back-breaking labour, prodigious reading, a brief dazzle of Edinburgh fame, an exciseman's post in Dumfries, and the composition of hundreds of poems and songs that reshaped Scottish letters.
Writing in a rich, supple Scots, at a moment when educated Scots were beginning to polish away their native tongue, Burns preserved a whole vocabulary of rural, sociable, and sometimes seditious speech. He died at thirty-seven, in debt and half-forgotten by the capital that had once feted him, on the very day his son Maxwell was born.