So you think you know Robert Burns?

Rabbie Burns, aka Robden of Solway Firth: eldest of seven; poet; lyricist; tax man; inspiration to liberals and socialists, and pioneer of the Romantic movement - is there anything we don’t know about the Bard?

Bachelor bard

Around about the same time he set up the Tarbolton Bachelors’ Club with his brother, Burns cottoned on to the power of verse as a chat-up technique, writing his first poem, O, Once I Lov’d a Bonnie Lass, about fellow farm labourer Nelly Kilpatrick. The legendary playboy and scourge of the kirk had his first child, Elizabeth Paton Burns, with his mother’s servant, while embarking on a relationship with Jean Armour, who fell pregnant with his twins around the same time he was exchanging bibles and platitudes with Mary Campbell, with whom he planned to emigrate to Jamaica. The immediate success of his first volume of poetry, which he had sold to raise funds for his passage there, led him to abandon the Jamaican move, and Mary, as he then married Jean Armour. He had 13 children (that we know of); five out of wedlock and three of whom he named Elizabeth. The poem he wrote for his first-born is commonly known as A Poet’s Welcome to his Love-begotten Daughter, but Burns called it Welcome to a Bastart Wean.

Literary legend

JD Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye was named for Burns’ song Comin’ thro the Rye. Protagonist Holden Caulfield’s sister Phoebe sings the song, getting the lyrics wrong and singing “a body catch a body” instead of “a body meet a body”, and even though Holden corrects her, he nonetheless says that his ideal job would be the catcher in the rye – someone who stands guard in a field of rye on a clifftop full of children playing, to catch anyone that ran too close to the edge.

Soviet slicker

Burns is big in Russia, which somewhat shamefully beat Scotland to the punch as the first country in the world to honour him with a commemorative stamp, in 1956. His translated works became popular during Imperial times, when he became the people’s poet, representing the needs and wants of the peasant classes the Tsarists ignored. His popularity continued in Soviet times, with his support of the French revolution earning him the respect of the Communist regime, and a new translation in 1924 selling over 600,000 copies. He has remained popular since the fall of the USSR, with his works still on the national curriculum.

Famous namesakes

Chinese burns; Pete Burns; Mr Charles Montgomery Burns; third degree burns; Burns London guitars; the seven towns named Burns in the US (Colorado, Kansas, New York, Oregon, Tennessee, Wisconsin, Wyoming); legendary cigar chomper George Burns; Krypton Factor presenter Gordon Burns; Edward Burns, writer of semi-autobiographical 90s movies about sensitive and conflicted Irish Catholic brothers She’s The One and The Brothers McMullen, and now best known as Mr Christy Turlington.

What can you tell us about Burns that we might not already know? Share your offbeat Burns trivia in the comments, on Facebook or on Twitter.