Invasion of the Bard: How the rest of the world was influenced by Robert Burns

Michael Jackson

ACCORDING to the late pop star’s friend David Gest, Michael Jackson recorded an entire album of songs featuring Burns’s lyrics set to pop. Speaking to BBC Alba, Gest said: “Both being fanatics, I said to Michael, ‘let’s do a play on Burns’ life’ and he said he would help me with the music. We went to his recording studio at the family house in Encino and we took about eight or ten of Burns’ poems and we put them to contemporary music, things like A Red Red Rose and Ae Fond Kiss and Tam O’Shanter.”

The songs were donated to the Robert Burns Birthplace Museum in Alloway, Ayrshire, and the museum plan to create a CD of them for general sale.

Gest even suggests Tam O’Shanter was the inspiration for Thriller, Jackson’s most popular song.

Abraham Lincoln

Abraham Lincoln: The 16th President of the United States saw America through civil war and the abolition of slavery, but still found time to read and memorise whole passages from his favourite poet. A teenage Lincoln found a copy of Burns’ poetry while living in Indiana, and in his twenties the future President memorised large parts of Tam O’Shanter, Holy Willie’s Prayer, The Cotters’ Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, Highland Mary, Bonnie Jean, and Dr. Hornbook. Contemporaries from his time in Illinois, where he moved in 1831, recalled that Lincoln knew huge chunks of Burns and could recite them at will. James Grant Wilson, editor of Chicago’s first literary magazine and an early Republican supporter, claimed that Burns told him of Burns and Shakespeare: “They are my two favorite authors, and I must manage to see their birthplaces some day if I can contrive to cross the Atlantic.”

THE 16th president of the United States saw America through civil war and the abolition of slavery, but still found time to memorise whole passages of his favourite poet. A teenage Lincoln found a copy of Burns’ poetry while living in Indiana, and the future president went on to memorise large parts of Tam O’Shanter, Holy Willie’s Prayer, The Cotters’ Saturday Night, Address to the Deil, Highland Mary, Bonnie Jean, and Dr. Hornbook. James Grant Wilson, editor of Chicago’s first literary magazine and a Republican supporter, claimed that Lincoln told him that Burns and Shakespeare were “my two favourite authors, and I must manage to see their birthplaces some day if I can contrive to cross the Atlantic.”

World of art

ARTISTS including Calum Colvin, Tracey Emin, and Peter Howson have all channelled Burns’s poetry through their work, some in one on-off pieces and others as part of a fuller exploration of the Scottish psyche.

Calum Colvin created a digital portrait of the Bard in 2002 with a stone head full of books and a crumpled Saltire at his neck, exploring themes of Burns as icon, Scot, and long-dead historical figure.

Tracey Emin, in typically explicit form, sketched a penis with a small bird standing on it in 2009, claiming it represented her take on the poem Nine Inch Will Please A Lady.

Peter Howson produced a softer take on the poet, with a more conventional series of portraits for the same showing as Emin in 2009, declaring he wanted “to delve into the true character of the flawed but beloved genius” as “one Ayrshire artist seen through the eyes of another”.

John Steinbeck

“BUT mousie thou art no thy lane/In proving foresight may be vain/The best laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft agley/An lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain for promised joy.” These lines from To A Mouse provided the title of Steinbeck’s most famous work, Of Mice and Men, a tale of two wandering farm workers in California during the Great Depression. As a former migrant worker himself, Steinbeck’s sensibility to rural poverty is something he had in common with Burns, and the “grief an’ pain for promised joy” is illustrated through the lie of the American dream in the novella, where promises of riches, property, and love are all denied to George and Lennie as they just try to make a living.

The USSR

BURNS became the people’s poet of Russia after the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917. Burns was admired for his belief in egalitarianism and was held up as an example of a politicised artist who was deeply patriotic at the same time. A new translation of Burns by Samuil Marshak in 1924 was hugely popular in the USSR, selling more than 600,000 copies, and is still taught in Russian schools. The Soviet Union had the world’s first commemorative stamp of the poet, in 1956, way ahead of any similar celebration in his homeland.

Bob Dylan

DYLAN revealed in 2008 that his greatest inspiration was not folk singer Woody Guthrie nor Dylan Thomas, the Welsh poet from whom many believe he took his last name (Dylan was born Robert Zimmerman). Dylan, like so many others, chose the Bard, specifically for his 1794 poem A Red, Red Rose and the lines “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June. / O, my luve’s like the melodie, / That’s sweetly play’d in tune.”

Dylan, like Patti Smith, has always been known for his incredible lyrics just as much as his melodies and voice, and his five-decade career has seen an evolution through folk, electronic, and blues phases, and as an unofficial icon for youth rebellion in the 1960s.

Lou Reed

THE veteran singer, songwriter, and former frontman of the Velvet Underground, headlined the Burns An’ A’ That! Festival in Ayrshire in 2005. Reed has drawn inspiration from A man’s a man for all that..., Burns’ take on the hollowness of money and status. He described the song as “a line of timeless history and pertinence reflecting the timeless optimism and reflection of the modern constriction of the working man.”

JD Salinger

HOLDEN CAULFIELD, the protagonist of JD Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, misunderstands the words of Robert Burns’ song about illict sex in a rye field (Comin’ Thro’ The Rye) and in so doing illustrates the last remnants of his innocence. The words of the song speak to him about the end of childhood rather than the distinctly adult activity around which the poem centres itself.

Patti Smith

THE “Godmother of Punk”, whose music is heavily influenced by poetry including French symbolists Baudelaire and Rimbaud, also has a creative soft spot for Burns. Smith’s raw, stripped-down style is just as evident in her debut album Horses (1975) as it is in her 2010 memoir Just Kids, in which she remembers life in New York in the 1970s with partner Robert Mapplethorpe.

Smith wrote her own music for Burns’ poem Afton Water and performed it at the 2003 Burns An’ A’ That! Festival. She also took photos inspired by Burns that featured in the exhibition Inspired at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, in 2009. In 2004, one newspaper critic related the following anecdote during a performance of hers in Edinburgh. “‘We love you Patti,’ bellows a voice from the crowd. ‘Robert Burns loves you,’ she replies, with a flourish.“