Burns still has admirers
Source: Agencies |
January 26, 2010, Tuesday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
SCOTLAND'S national poet Robert Burns is probably unique in world literature in having his birthday on January 25 marked annually by thousands of festive dinners and recitations of his works around the world.
Glasses of whisky are raised to toast the "Immortal Memory" of the poor farmer's son born in Ayrshire in southwest Scotland in 1759 whose poetry is read and loved over 250 years later.
Burns, who died aged only 37, is renowned not only for some of the most beautiful love poems in the English language, but also for folk songs, political satire, and his devotion to democracy and the common man.
Why is Burns so internationally popular?
Robert Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at St Andrew's University, said in the introduction to his award-winning biography of Burns that the bard had achieved his successes "not with transcendental illumination but with daftness, deftness, warmth and humor, and a sometimes painful sense of his own vulnerability."
"I think he really was able to connect with different traditions ... cultures," Crawford, himself a poet, also said.
He noted the bard has a diverse range of admirers: the Chinese are said to compare his folk songs with their traditional poetry and he has long been popular in Russia.
Glasses of whisky are raised to toast the "Immortal Memory" of the poor farmer's son born in Ayrshire in southwest Scotland in 1759 whose poetry is read and loved over 250 years later.
Burns, who died aged only 37, is renowned not only for some of the most beautiful love poems in the English language, but also for folk songs, political satire, and his devotion to democracy and the common man.
Why is Burns so internationally popular?
Robert Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at St Andrew's University, said in the introduction to his award-winning biography of Burns that the bard had achieved his successes "not with transcendental illumination but with daftness, deftness, warmth and humor, and a sometimes painful sense of his own vulnerability."
"I think he really was able to connect with different traditions ... cultures," Crawford, himself a poet, also said.
He noted the bard has a diverse range of admirers: the Chinese are said to compare his folk songs with their traditional poetry and he has long been popular in Russia.
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