The Life of Robert Burns: Scotland's Bard

Robert Burns' Personal Life 

He had already written his first love poems when he was fifteen, to a farmer's daughter from Dalrymple. It was the beginning of his lifelong love of women and his celebration of them in poems and songs. Burns had many affairs throughout his life and enjoyed drinking with friends, but he was far from the over-sexed, booze-sodden farmhand of yore, a slightly misleading myth that has tended to overshadow his literary legacy.  

Robert Burns fathered over a dozen children to various women, and his sexual behaviour was radical, especially in 18th-century society. The handsome, charismatic poet undoubtedly enjoyed the company of women, from society ladies to servant girls.  

Burns' first child was by a servant, Elizabeth Paton, who worked at Lochlea farm in Tarbolton (the family had moved to the village when Robert was nineteen), and one of his most famous love affairs, though never consummated, was with the upper-class Agnes McLehose, for whom he wrote the beautiful parting song Ae Fond Kiss. 

Burns acknowledged women as individuals who had valuable insights and opinions and were stimulating. He started a life-long correspondence with sometime patron, Mrs Frances Anna Dunlop, a well-to-do Ayrshire widow who admired his poems. In his work, he managed to combine descriptions of his prurient exploits with the tenderest of emotions, memorably and simply expressed. Love (and lust!) and poetry were always to run together for Burns.

ncG1vNJzZmivp6x7tK%2FOraOappRjvLOzjqKlrKiZp661tc6nZqybn6m5orrDrGSbmaKZ