'Humming the air with the verses I have framed'

Andrew Motion welcomes a balanced new biography of the ploughman poet

'Humming the air with the verses I have framed'

Andrew Motion welcomes a balanced new biography of the ploughman poet

When Keats visited Burns's Ayrshire birthplace in 1818 he treated "this mortal body of a thousand days" as a tragic but still vivid force: "Yet can I ope thy window-sash," he wrote, "to find / The meadow thou hast tramped o'er and o'er." Mick Imlah, in the much more recent tribute to Burns that appears in The Lost Leader, imagines the poet as an "Ayrshire Orpheus" whose "matchless" songs and voice are able to bewitch Pluto and "prickly Proserpine": "The infernal lakes had filled with lily water, / Such was the gentle power of that recital." Imlah is hardly a Keatsian poet, but he makes a similar point. Burns is generally remembered as a "Heaven-taught ploughman", a hard drinker and a womaniser. Although these things are important, and certainly need to be written about, they can deflect our attention from what is less sensational and fundamentally more appealing about Burns: the unquenchable humanity of his poetry and songs. By combining a reliable account of the former with a rich appreciation of the latter, Robert Crawford has done him a great service.

Crawford has righted old wrongs - scraping layers of yellowing varnish from received impressions of Burns - and he has also made some vital new connections between Burns's independent-minded politics and the nationalism of contemporary Scotland. The effect is not to produce an expediently up-to-date version of the national poet (there's enough plain-speaking about Burns's laddishness, his support for the slave trade, his snobbishness and his hypocrisy to prevent that happening). Rather, we get a portrait of a man with astonishing natural gifts, living in toughly actual times. The poetry is allowed to breathe an air of genius, but is always connected to the spirit of its places.

Having said that, there's still a good deal we don't and never will know about Burns. Because of his comparatively humble origins, and because he lived the whole of the first part of his life away from most kinds of public eye or recording hand, there is little detailed information about some of his circumstances. Because many of his later relationships were with barely literate servant women, we have no sense of their personalities from surviving documents. And because his own career went so quickly from obscurity to scandalous success, trustworthy stories about him are always prey to outbursts of invention or gossip. For these reasons, and despite its steady application of scholarship and good sense, as well as its generally lucid tone, Crawford's book can't help but seem a shade constrained by the shadedness of its subject. There are no pictures. No available physical descriptions of most of the women. A paucity of intimate correspondence.

But there is always the living, breathing warmth of the poetry, which Crawford rightly keeps close to centre stage. In the opening pages, with comparatively little to report on the lie of the land and farmer-parents, he gives us a few pages instead on the lullabies and folk-tales that Burns heard as a child, soon linking these with an account of the local kirk and school. It gives the impression of the embryo-poet as a child fed on a rich broth of evocations, melodies, jaunty stories and admonitions. And this in turn makes it seem hardly surprising that Burns was soon drawn to "private 'crooning'" - a form of oral composition in which sense and sound, word and music, new inventions and ancient inheritances are cleverly mixed and united. As he said himself: "My way is: I consider the poetic Sentiment, correspondent to my idea of the musical expression; then chuse my theme; begin one Stanza; when that is composed, which is generally the most difficult part of the business, I walk out, sit down now & then, look out for objects in Nature around me that are in unison or harmony with the cogitations of my fancy & workings of my bosom; humming every now & then the air with the verses I have framed."

There's no reason to suppose Burns greatly changed his methods of composition in his later life, though he did develop them to create a deeper resonance and authority. The mingling of new ideas with ancient elements is especially interesting. Like many folk artists (Bob Dylan, for example, who incidentally seems to be honouring Burns and this very process in "Highlands" on Time Out of Mind), he sometimes incorporates traditional phrases (musical as well as verbal) without altering them, and sometimes uses them as a stepping stone to higher or lower things. Lower things, in the case of many playfully filthy effusions; higher things in the case of "John Anderson, my Jo" - which he first knew as a bawdy ballad (and transcribed into The Merry Muses of Caledonia), but later purified to make one of his most beautiful and heart-touching poems:

John Anderson my jo, John,
We clamb the hill the gither;
And mony a canty day, John,
We've had wi' ane anither:

Now we maun totter down, John,
And hand in hand we'll go;
And sleep the gither at the foot,
John Anderson my Jo.

By the later 1770s, as Burns entered his 20s, these habits of mind were already set - but the delicacy of their machinery, and the opportunity to transform them into poems, was always likely to suffer at the hand of circumstance. An increasingly difficult relationship with his father, hard times on the farm, the censorious judgments of the kirk, a conflict between his inheritance and his ambitions: all these contributed to a severe depression. Even when this lifted, he still had to endure further stretches of hard manual work, uprootedness and doubt that life would allow him to become the person he knew himself to be. Leaving home helped; new and sympathetic friendships with poetry-writing young men his own age helped; but what Crawford calls the "step-change" in his writing only occurred when he read Robert Fergusson for the first time. "His turn to Standard Habbie [the verse form often referred to as "the Burns stanza"] and the vernacular language of lowland Scotland was as crucial for his ear as the discovery of long lines and a 'barbaric yawp' would be for Walt Whitman in the following century."

As Burns found his authentic voice, so his life found the shape for which it is well known. Once again, Crawford proves both a reliable guide to what is familiar, and a sceptical debunker of myths: there is no better existing history of Burns's stupendously unfaithful life with Jean Armour, his fling with "Highland Mary", his countless other affairs, the brilliant success of his Poems, his lionisation in Edinburgh, his eventual return to the country, his emerging republicanism and the final days in Dumfries where, broken by illness, excess and melancholy, he died in 1796 at the age of 37.

Neither is there a more balanced account of the ways in which Burns's poems - the brief songs and lyrics, as well as a masterpiece such as "Tam o' Shanter" - are informed by the conditions of his life while managing to transcend them. Burns's great achievement as a poet is to transfigure the very particular details of his tempestuous existence so that they speak not only for the wider national culture of which they were a part, but for people everywhere. That is why Burns Night is still celebrated around the world. Not because it allows a bit of nationalistic flummery, but because it celebrates one of the great poets of the human heart.

Andrew Motion's Ways of Life: On Places, Painters and Poets is published by Faber.