SOURCE: "Robert Burns (1759-96)," in A Handbook to English Romanticism, edited by Jean Raimond and J.R. Watson, St. Martin's Press, 1992, pp. 42-44.

Low has edited two well-regarded books on Burns, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (1974) and Critical Essays on Robert Burns (1975). In the following essay, he provides a brief overview of Burns's career as a poet.

Robert Burns, the eldest son of a tenant farmer in Ayrshire, Scotland, grew up to a life of hard physical work, poverty, and acute awareness of social disadvantage. It was to find 'some kind of counterpoise' to this harsh set of circumstances, and to amuse himself by transcribing 'the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast', that he began to write poetry. By his mid-twenties he displayed exceptional mastery of both satire and lyric in Lowland Scots. In the summer of 1786, when he was...