Rabbie Burns
Posted January 23, 2009, 19:01 ET Comments Off
Sunday is the 250th anniversary of Burns’ birth, and a good time to ask why we should care. His poetry seldom rises higher than the level of amusing doggerel, and in his personal life he was the very model of poets-behaving-badly. At school, we were made to memorize the poetry because (gag me) it was uplifting. A man’s a man for a that. As for the dialect, the poems would be considered hate speech, like the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, were the Scots an oppressed minority.
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