Scottish poet Robert Burns' depoliticised modern image overshadows his radical history

Robert Burns, born on this day in 1759, is the iconic Scottish poet. That much is well-known.

But what’s often forgotten is that Burns was a political radical.

He supported the revolutions in America, France, and Ireland that rocked the Atlantic world of the late eighteenth century, and he backed democratic reform inside Britain, too.

Robert Burns, then, makes as much sense alongside revolutionaries like Tom Paine and Wolfe Tone as he does among the poets.

Burns held many positions which were radical for their time while being taken for granted today

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Burns was from rural Ayrshire on the west coast of Scotland.

Unlike some of the other left-leaning poets of the Romantic movement – think Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley – Burns’ family were not aristocracy but tenant farmers who had to labour to survive.

Burns himself would have to work throughout his life, first as a farmer and then as an excise officer.

It was this background in labour that planted Burns’ solidarity with liberation struggles.

One Tory critic who nevertheless had to admit Burns’ poetic talent called him a "heav’n taught ploughman."

Another said that, "Burns’ politics always smell of the smithy."

Burns was one of a number of radical poets in the romantic era, including Percy Bysshe Shelley

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Burns’ early poetry during the 1780s, like Address of Beelzebub and The Two Dogs, already took aim at rural landlords in Scotland for their exploitation of the labouring class.

He also endorsed the American Revolution, a cause celebre of the British left at the time, in Ballad on the American War (1784).

But it was the even more radical revolution in France after 1789 that best brought out Burns’ politics.

At the same time as it polarised British domestic politics, spooking the ruling aristocracy that the French experiment might be tried in Britain, too, Burns embraced the new horizon burst open in Paris.

His 1793 poem, Scots Wha Hae (1793), which is known as a ballad of Scottish identity about Robert the Bruce at the Battle of Bannockburn in 1314, actually also includes a direct reference to the Tennis Court Oath made by the revolutionaries at Versailles in 1789, when they refused to disband on King Louis’ orders: "Let us do – or die."

And Burns didn’t only endorse the initial, more moderate face of the French Revolution like some other British progressives.

Burns supported both the American and French revolutions, including their rejection of hereditary rule

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He continued to back the French project when it began to challenge monarchy as such – not just absolute monarchy.

Burns’ poetry often rejected the hierarchical norms of aristocratic society root-and-branch: "rank is but the guinea’s stamp."

He loved the French radicals’ song, 'Ça ira', and included references to it in his own poems.

"It shall be so,
Liberty will be established
Despite the tyrants everyone will rise up."

Burns refused to remove his hat for the national anthem in Britain, and he condemned the government for its hostile policy towards republican France, too.

Burns also supported the Irish Rebellion of 1798 led by Wolfe Tone and the radical United Irishmen, the most powerful attempt to expand revolutionary principles into Britain’s immediate ‘sphere of influence.’

Frederick Douglass, the noted US abolitionist, praised Burns' republicanism half a century after his death

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But Burns’ progressive politics soon landed him in hot water.

1790s Britain was in the grip of a sort of Georgian-era McCarthyism, where panicked elites, represented by William Pitt’s government, imposed violent political repression to stop radicals and reformers from organising a movement like the French Revolution at home.

Radicals in Scotland like the lawyer Thomas Muir were tried for treason for demanding reform, and Burns himself was being spied on by the Home Office.

Burns wrote about his persecution in verse:

"The shrinking Bard down alley skulks,
And dreads a meeting worse than Woolwich hulks:
Tho there, his heresies in Church and State,
Might well award him Muir and Palmer’s fate."

But whereas the Red Scare of Pitt’s England helped hammer other poet-supporters of the French Revolution, like Wordsworth and Blake, into conservatives, Burns held to his principles until his death in 1796.

During the two centuries since, some continued to remember the political commitment of Burns.

The U.S. abolitionist, Frederick Douglass, for example, visited Burns’ birthplace in Ayrshire in 1846, and he praised Burns as a republican:

"...filled with contempt for the hollow pretensions set up by the shallow-brained aristocracy..."

But for the most part, especially nowadays, a depoliticised image of Burns tends to overshadow his radical history.

So this Burns Night, let’s not only toast Robert Burns as a poet who helped redefine Scottish cultural identity but as an activist who wanted to change the social and political order of the entire world.

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