Robert Burns’ birthday
Scottish poet Robert Burns is born on this day in 1759.The day is still celebrated by Burns fans across the English-speaking world with high-spirited Robert Burns Night feasts featuring haggis and other Scottish delicacies as well as enthusiastic drinking toasting and speechmaking.Burns the son of a poor farmer received little formal schooling but read extensively.A restless dissatisfied spirit he fell in love with a young woman named Jean Armour in the mid-1780s but refused to marry her when she became pregnant.
The pair endured a legal struggle at the end of which the courts declared Burns legally single-but he later married Armour anyway.Eventually the couple had nine children the last one born on the day of Burns funeral.Burns published his first poetry collection Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect in 1786 and he quickly became the darling of elite Edinburgh intellectuals.Perhaps more famous for his lively lyrics in the Scottish dialect than for his longer more literary poems Burns is still beloved and celebrated today as the author of the New Years anthem For Auld Lang Syne.
