A Burns Night Reader
By David Swanson
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— Talia
This Thursday, like so many others around the world and across the centuries, I will be celebrating the birth of Robert Burns with friends, poetry, and a steaming pile of sheep offal. I cannot wait. Though I have no recollection of Burns Night from my Edinburgh childhood—I was only two when we left—it's been a regular source of joy since college in St. Andrews, where the focus was more on the whisky than the food or verse.
The Burns Supper is a bit like Scotland's Thanksgiving, an annual feast bound by fellowship, tradition, and culinary pageantry. First celebrated in 1801—just five years after the Ploughman Poet's death at the age of 37—Burns Night has become a global affair. For some it may seem challenging, centered, as it is, around the the haggis, a liberally spiced marriage of offal and oatmeal, sealed in a sheep’s stomach, boiled, and served with neeps and tatties (that's turnips and potatoes, for the uninitiated). The evening is filled with bagpipes, toasts, recitations, games of "hide the haggis", and freely flowing whisky. As the Bard himself said, "a now-and-then tribute to Bacchus is like the cold bath, bracing and invigorating."
I'll be skipping the whisky, but I sincerely love haggis, and I'm always happy to honor one of my favorite poets. For a long time, my twitter portrait was a photo of the Burns statue in Central Park—a Scotsman in New York—and one of my most treasured possessions is an old leather-bound volume of his poetry. I'll be taking it with me on Thursday, which is a bit like bringing your own bible to church, but Burns Night comes but once a year.
Despite never having visited the United States before his death in 1796, Burns—supreme personification of Scotland—has been described as among the most American of poets. Take "A Man's A Man for A' That," written in the final year of Burns's life; it reads today like a universal hymn to egalitarian ideals, the kind America's founding fathers professed to cherish. Burns was fascinated with America, and America embraced Burns. Among his numerous songs and poems, he wrote a "Ballad On The American War" and an "Ode [For General Washington's Birthday]". He gave Catcher in the Rye and Of Mice and Men their titles. He was the favorite poet of Abraham Lincoln and Maya Angelou and Bob Dylan.
Today, most scholars agree that Burns likely suffered from bipolar disorder, so it makes some kind of sense that his work has been a touchstone for fellow mad geniuses such as Edgar Allen Poe, Emily Dickinson, and Robert Lowell. And as a hard-partying writer, musician and lady's man—a celebrity whose fame rested squarely on the strength of his charisma and hit songs—Burns was arguably the original rock star.
If you want to learn more about Burns, Burn's Night, tartan, bagpipes, kilts, golf, and whisky, read on. I've collected a wealth of material covering over two hundred years Burnsiana—including pieces by John Keats and Walt Whitman. There are also several pieces that extol the virtues of the haggis, so if nothing else, I hope you'll be inspired to try that "warm-reekin', rich" delicacy: King of Sausages, Chieftain of Puddings, Scotland's daunting yet delicious contribution to international cuisine.
Address to a Haggis
By Robert Burns
Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, 1786
Fair fa’ your honest, sonsie face,
Great Chieftain o’ the Puddin-race!
Aboon them a’ ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy of a grace
As lang ‘s my arm.The groaning trencher there ye fill,
Your hurdies like a distant hill,
Your pin wad help to mend a mill
In time o’ need,
While thro’ your pores the dews distil
Like amber bead.His knife see Rustic-labour dight,
An’ cut ye up wi’ ready slight,
Trenching your gushing entrails bright,
Like onie ditch;
And then, O what a glorious sight,
Warm-reekin', rich!
On Visiting The Tomb Of Burns
By John Keats
The town, the churchyard, and the setting sun,
The clouds, the trees, the rounded hills all seem,
Though beautiful, cold- strange- as in a dream
I dreamed long ago, now new begun.
The short-liv'd, paly summer is but won
From winter's ague for one hour's gleam;
Through sapphire warm their stars do never beam:
All is cold Beauty; pain is never done.
For who has mind to relish, Minos-wise,
The real of Beauty, free from that dead hue
Sickly imagination and sick pride
Cast wan upon it? Burns! with honour due
I oft have honour'd thee. Great shadow, hide
Thy face; I sin against thy native skies.
An Apology for Burns
Harpers, February 1851
Is Robert Burns to be held up to the never-dying desecration of posterity, as a man steeped in evil and impiety, because, with fiery ardor, he rushed into the polemic war then raging in Ayrshire, lashed with unsparing and terrible sarcasm and wit the vices and superstitions of his age, and, unfortunately, fell a victim to the social habits of the day, before his better judgment and nobler principles had gained the moral ascendency over the burning passions of his youth?
From his earliest years, we learn, he was subject to palpitation and nervous excitement. The victim of hypochondria, with fitful glimpses or sunbursts, lighting up the waste of life with ineffable beauty and love, to escape from its terrible shadow, which haunted him through life, he, unfortunately, was driven to take refuge from himself in the excitement and vivacity of the social board, as Johnson fled from himself to the tavern dinner, to revel in his astonishing powers of conversation, while Burke and Beauclerk quailed under the eye of the critical dictator.
Some of the Haunts of Burns
The Atlantic, October 1860
Beholding his poor, mean dwelling and its surroundings, and picturing his outward life and earthly manifestations from these, one does not so much wonder that the people of that day should have failed to recognize all that was admirable and immortal in a disreputable, drunken, shabbily clothed, and shabbily housed man, consorting with associates of damaged character, and, as his only ostensible occupation, gauging the whiskey which he too often tasted. Siding with Burns, as we needs must, in his plea against the world, let us try to do the world a little justice too. It is far easier to know and honor a poet when his fame has taken shape in the spotlessness of marble than when the actual man comes staggering before you, besmeared with the sordid stains of his daily life.
Robert Burns as Poet and Person
By Walt Whitman
North American Review, 1886
I take my observation of the Scottish bard by considering him as an individual amid the crowded clusters, galaxies, of the old world—and fairly inquiring and suggesting what out of these myriads he too may be to the Western Republic. In the first place no poet on record so fully bequeaths his own personal magnetism, nor illustrates more pointedly how one’s verses, by time and reading, can so curiously fuse with the versifier’s own life and death, and give final light and shade to all.
I would say a large part of the fascination of Burns’s homely, simple dialect-melodies is due, for all current and future readers, to the poet’s personal “errors,” the general bleakness of his lot, his ingrain’d pensiveness, his brief dash into dazzling, tantalizing, evanescent sunshine—finally culminating in those last years of his life, his being taboo’d and in debt, sick and sore, yaw’d as by contending gales, deeply dissatisfied with everything, most of all with himself—high-spirited too—(no man ever really higher-spirited than Robert Burns.)
Robert Burns: These Scottish Scenes Inspired his Poems
LIFE, January 3, 1949
At the moment of midnight every New Year's 'Eve, English-speaking people everywhere like to join hands and sing Robert Burns's Auld Lang Syne. To Scotsmen this song is almost an anthem. They meet regularly in Burns clubs all over the world from Scotland to China to eat haggis (a meal and meat pudding sent to them on ice), drink whisky, sing the lovely songs and recite the robust ballads of their national hero.
Burns, born in Alloway, Scotland in 1759, was no model hero. Extraordinarily handsome and chronically penniless, he loved lustily—he had children by at least four different women. He drank heartily—some of his best poems are about drink. He wrote warmly about his loving and drinking, the local farmers, the gentle rivers around his home.
Scotland, Ghosts, and Glory
By Rowe Findlay
National Geographic, July 1984
To bar Highlanders from ever again fielding an enemy army, shaken London broke the clans by banning rallies, arms, tartans, and pipes… While some of the dispossessed crossed wide seas to new lives, others went down to Glasgow or Aberdeen or Edinburgh, which, flourishing with commerce, outgrew its medieval confines. As the New Town rose, an intellectual golden age gave Scotland and the world Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations, John and William Hunter's insights into anatomy, and Robert Adam's neoclassic architecture.
Amid such brilliance, Robert Burns won fame by simple eloquence. In lyric English or the broad Scots of Ayr, he celebrated Wallace's iron at Stirling Bridge and Tam O'Shanter's flight from witches across Brig o' Doon.
Burns was dead at 37, his short years filled with hard toil on the land, collecting and adapting 300 Scottish songs, with poet-izing, lusty conviviality, and romantic extravagances. The sheer force of his simple lines made him not merely national poet but also a premier figure in Scotland's history, and he gave the world a tender song to toll the years: "We'll tak a cup o' kindness yet For auld lang syne."
The Highland Tradition of Scotland
By Hugh Trevor-Roper
The Invention of Tradition, 1983
Today, whenever Scotchmen gather together to celebrate their national identity, they assert it openly by certain distinctive national apparatus. They wear the kilt, woven in a tartan whose colour and pattern indicates their ‘clan’; and if they indulge in music, their instrument is the bagpipe. This apparatus, to which they ascribe great antiquity, is in fact largely modern. It is developed after, sometimes long after, the Union with England against which it is, in a sense, a protest. Before the Union, it did indeed exist in vestigial form; but that form was regarded by the large majority of Scotchmen as a sign of barbarism: the badge of roguish, idle, predatory, blackmailing Highlanders who were more of a nuisance than a threat to civilized, historic Scotland. And even in the Highlands, even in that vestigial form, it was relatively new: it was not the original, or the distinguishing badge of Highland society.
The Origin of the Kilt
By Alexander Cockburn
The Atlantic, January 1985
I found my old kilt in a cupboard the other day and had an instant memory of myself, attired in this same kilt, marching into my school dining room behind a piper and a gray-brown sausage with a caliber of some 200 millimeters. When the piper had stopped and the platter bearing the sausage had been set down, I waved a knife over it and began chanting in a bogus Scottish accent,
"Fair fa' your honest, sonsie face,
Great chieftain o' the puddin-race!
Aboon them a' ye tak your place,
Painch, tripe, or thairm:
Weel are ye wordy o' a grace
As lang's my arm.And at the conclusion of Burns's "Address to a Haggis," amid a few cheers from my schoolfellows I plunged in the knife to liberate the minced sheep's guts and oatmeal from their casing.
Fare of the Country: Haggis, History and Humour
By Gloria Levbitas
New York Times, January 5, 1986
The origin of haggis, as with many other national dishes, is obscure. A similar dish was known to the ancient Greeks and Romans and is mentioned in some 14th-century Scottish chronicles. Dr. Michael Krause, a physician from Hamburg who recently tasted it for the first time, reported that it was much like a Silesian dish he called ''derma.'' And although haggis includes pork fat or suet, its taste and texture also resemble the Jewish dish made of chicken fat, flour, spices and onions baked in a steer's intestines that is also called derma.
The French honor its Scottish connections by calling it "Puding de St. Andre" although, in fact, the word haggis is probably French in origin and comes from the verb hacher—to chop up or mangle. Though unproven, the French origin seems likely as French influence was strong in Scotland until 1603 and other traces of that tongue remain in the Scottish lexicon. A leg of lamb is called gigot and a serving dish is an ashet—assiette in French.
In His Kilts. A Man’s a Man’s for a That
By Malcolm MacPherson
New York Times, June 29, 1986
The sight of the kilt was once enough to make an Englishman jump, and often not quickly enough. It was sometimes the last sight for the unwary Englishman in this life before he was set upon by naked Scots out of ambush, their stripped-off kilts coloring the air as they howled down the heather with their claymores windmilling to the abrasions of bagpipes. And a good thing it was too.
Today the kilt can have the same effect, and not just on the English. The flashing pleats of earthy colors, the contradiction of grown men in frocks ("A Jock in a frock," the English sometimes gibe from safe distances), and the damn-it-all indifference to opinion of the kilt make one ask if the Scot is dangerous, resolutely his own independent man or has haggis for brains. The questions breed mighty curiosity.
Bard of Friendly Fire
By Robert Crawford
London Review of Books, July 25, 2002
England may have a national poet, but it has no national bard. For better and for worse, Scotland has. It isn’t Ossian, and, despite the splendid attentions of Carcanet’s 16-volume edition, it isn’t Hugh MacDiarmid. Burns awarded himself that heavyweight title and has retained it ever since. In his own 37-year lifetime he was toasted by his fellow Freemasons as ‘Caledonia’s bard’. Arriving in Scotland’s Parliamentless but resurgent post-1707 capital, Burns wrote as ‘A Scottish bard, proud of the name’, and proclaimed that his ‘highest ambition’ was ‘to sing in his Country’s service’. Playing a leading role in several men’s clubs, from the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club to the boozy, bawdy Crochallan Fencibles (for whom he collected and sometimes wrote such songs as ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’), he laid the foundations of his own cult.
‘The Master Poet of Democracy’
By John Carey
New York Review of Books, November 5, 2009
Robert Burns is different from the other great European poets both in achievement and in reputation. If you ask a group of academic friends to list the great poets of the last two or three hundred years, it is quite likely that his name will not come up at all. Should you draw attention to his omission, you may well meet with some resistance: “Burns? Oh yes, of course. But…” What that “But” implies is that Burns is not so much a poet as a writer of popular songs, some of them embarrassingly sentimental, and all of them lacking the stringency and intricacy of serious poetry. Besides, your friends may urge, he is less a poet than a Scottish national icon, even, perhaps, a Scottish tribal god. He is hallowed, as some other gods are, in an annual midwinter ceremony on his birthday, January 25, with the equivalent of the Roman Saturnalia, when haggis is consumed, Scotch whisky drunk, and bagpipes piped, in an orgy of assertive nationalism that has nothing remotely to do with literature.
In Scotland, Guts, Glory and Haggis
By Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan
New York Times, December 19, 2014
Ah, haggis. Before I’d gone to Scotland this year, I wondered what exactly made the dish—sheep’s innards packed into sheep’s stomach—qualify as a delicacy. But as an adventurous cook and eater, I pride myself in trying everything at least once, so I eagerly spooned a first taste of it into my mouth at a castle in Edinburgh. It was a revelation—intensely rich and meaty, with the earthy flavor of what my mother calls “spare parts” combined with the comforting muskiness of oatmeal. It instantly won me over.
During my five-week stay in Scotland, I would seek it out wherever I went—trying it both in its traditional form, as “haggis, neeps and tatties” (haggis, turnips and potatoes), but also tucked within dumplings and presented in other modern forms on menus. (Sadly, I was unable to find a bar snack of haggis nachos a friend had told me about.) In one of Edinburgh’s best traditional Scottish restaurants, though, I noticed that Cockburn’s haggis was often on offer. The butchery may be tiny but it ships to restaurants and grocers all over Britain. Then I heard that Cockburn was the first champion haggis maker in the country. I knew I had to visit.
Burns Night: The Battle Over Scottish Identity Continues
By Annalena McAfee
The Guardian, January 25, 2017
Poetry makes nothing happen, Auden wrote. It does, however, provide an excellent excuse for a late-January bacchanal. The annual Burns Night supper, marking the birth of Scotland’s national poet, reprises the excesses of Christmas and New Year’s Eve, with a ritualistic meal, strong drink and verse recitat-ions standing in for carols.
Accessorised in tartan, in pubs, clubs and private homes throughout the UK, revellers raise glasses to the immortal memory, musically recall “Auld Lang Syne” and, in robust rhyming Scots vernacular, praise haggis then spear, eviscerate and serve it...
Some native Scots, however, are sceptical about the tradition, and Scottish scepticism, forged in the birthplace of David Hume, has a particularly abrasive quality. One of the most high-profile dissenters from Burnsian orthodoxy was Scotland’s other national poet, Hugh MacDiarmid, who, in 1926, in his most celebrated poem, “A Drunk Man Looks at the Thistle”, wrote of the Ayrshire bard: “Mair nonsense has been uttered in his name/ Than in ony’s barrin liberty and Christ.” MacDiarmid attacked the Burns cult for its reactionary kitsch and “kailyard” sentimentality: “You canna gang to a Burns supper even/ Wi-oot some wizened scrunt o a knock-knee/ Chinee turns roon to say, ‘Him Haggis—velly goot!’ /And ten to wan the piper is a Cockney.”
How Americans Acquired a Taste for Haggis, with Help from the Scottish Poet Robert Burns
By Sadie Stein
The New Yorker, January 25, 2019
Burns Night’s waggish combination of challenge eating, whiskey consumption, and Instagram-worthy pageantry can only have helped raise its profile in the digital age. And perhaps the embrace of nose-to-tail fare in recent years has helped to rehabilitate haggis’s reputation. Only recently, Andrew Zimmern overcame a lifelong aversion to the dish to tout a venison haggis on his show “Bizarre Foods.” (Scottish Gourmet has since added a venison version to its catalogue.) Haggis fusion, too, seems to be in its infancy. “I talked to someone about haggis tacos,” Robinson said. “Someone else was making a haggis fritter.”
For many, though, it remains a comfort food, pure and simple. “There’s nothing more satisfying than addressing the haggis the moment you plunge the knife in and cut deep,” Bloomfield told me. “A plume of hot meat and spicy aromatics disperses into the air that really touches and warms the soul.” As a late-in-life convert, I can only describe haggis as the ultimate cold-weather meal: warm and hearty, easy to spoon up, and straightforward enough in flavor to make an exhausted palate sigh with relief.
