Robert Burns should be on every curriculum, says Gerry Carruthers

“What was all that about, prof,” I ask him. “How does it happen that Robert Burns is missing from the recommended study list in so many schools? Is it any different now?”

His response kicks off a free master-class in interpreting and analysing the work of a man to whom he confers the accolade “our one, blue-chip, literary icon”. It’s one of those teachable times when scales fall from your eyes and you realise you’ve been backing too many wrong horses in what you think amounts to literary improvement. I should have been reading a lot more Robert Burns.

Robert Burns (Image: free)

Shouldn’t the study of his work, then, be firmly embedded in Scotland’s curriculum at both primary and secondary level? “You won’t get any argument from me on that one,” he says. “Certainly, many good teachers are already doing this, but perhaps we need to enable them to do much more beyond a small corpus of poems.

“Our Centre for Robert Burns Studies launched a major online course which has been taken by more than 30,000 people across the world. There’s something there that’s ready-made for teachers to take ideas from. There’s endless stuff you can do with Burns.”

The international popularity of Scotland’s national poet eclipses that of any other Scot in any other sector or endeavour. The increasing hunger for more knowledge about Burns is reflected in two recent, game-changing developments, both of them undertaken by professor Carruthers and a small team of Burns devotees at Glasgow University.

Last month, the university was awarded The Queen’s Anniversary Prize, the highest honour that UK academia can bestow, recognising excellence, innovation and public benefit in work by UK colleges and universities. Much of that work forms the basis of an astonishingly ambitious and epic 10-volume canon featuring correspondence, poetry, songs and collected essays from the world’s top Burns scholars.

“The main reason we secured the prize was our inter-disciplinary work, such as testing manuscripts with colleagues in chemistry. It’s been led by Professor Murray Pittock who’s study into Burns and tourism in Scotland has led to work which has helped Burns’ Ellisland Farm in Dumfriesshire. This research showed that Burns is worth more than £200m annually to the Scottish economy and that his brand alone is worth around £140m every year.

When the collection is finished in the next four years it will stand as the ultimate Robert Burns collection. Five volumes have already been completed, including the Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, published earlier this year.

Professor Carruthers is justly proud of the work and research which he and the rest of the Glasgow University team have sculpted. He believes that within Burns’ songs and poems are the keys and codas to Scotland’s understanding of itself and to an acceptance of the cultural idiosyncrasies and contradictions which define us and which drive many of us half-mad in self-analysis. Professor Carruthers talks about what he describes as Burns’ “promiscuous sympathy”.

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By this, I think he means that Burns is the antithesis of tribalism and refusing to break out of your own silo; where political, religious and cultural shibboleths are underscored by red lines preventing you from walking in the shoes of your opponents or thinking from their perspective. Professor Carruthers regards this as being the essence of the humanity at the heart of Burns’ work and a sacred gift.

“From the outset of his output he was championed by many of the UK’s leading romantic and enlightenment figures and beyond,” says Professor Carruthers. “Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Keats made pilgrimages to Ellisland Farm and all recognised from the off what a great writer he was. Yet, because of Holy Wullie’s prayer – then considered to be almost subversive – Burns was deemed to be dangerous and immoral by the Presbyterian establishment.

“He’s on the moderate wing of the Kirk versus the hard-line Calvinists and only gradually throughout the 19th century does he emerge as Scotland’s national poet. It doesn’t happen instantly. He’s writing in Scots in the 1780s and that’s seen as Jacobite, even Episcopalian and quasi-Catholic. Even years after his death, a fog of suspicion curled around him.”

The professor warms to the theme of Burns as a global icon and how we’ve yet to understand fully his continuing impact on various nationalities and ethnic groups and at both ends of cultural and political spectrums. “We should never have enough of him and it’s vitally important that we provide our young people with endless opportunities to study him.

“At the most basic level, he possesses a genius with words that’s almost freakish, similar to Shakespeare, Joyce and Blake. Nor can you overstate his influence on international literature. “Of Mice and Men riffs on To a Mouse, while The Catcher in the Rye riffs on “Comin’ Thro’ the Rye. He’s made such an impact on the English language globally.

“Many people think Man’s Inhumanity to Man comes from Shakespeare, but it’s actually from Burns. He’s the man who broadcast to the world Scotland’s image in its landscapes, songs and romance. He creates the Scottish canvas and it’s a huge one. Some people choose to focus on his sexual promiscuity, but I prefer to look at has promiscuous sympathy. He sympathises with Mary Queen of Scots and also the Covenanters at different extremes. He’s a great imagineer. He can be endlessly reread. He’s the poet of human nature who reflects back to us our joys and our stupidities.”

Burns’ Ellisland Farm in Dumfriesshire (Image: free)

I tell him of my pet theory about how poetry can reach children are considered ‘unacademic’ by society in ways that prose with its more formal straitjacket can’t. And how the language of the streets has its own rhythms and cadences. My uncle often used the aphorism: “It’s no’ worth two blaws on a ragman’s trumpet” to convey uselessness.” Whoever first uttered that was a poet.

“We can talk all types of rubbish about scansion and rhythm,” he says, “but actually what we all recognise instinctively in human beings is the pulse and the beat. Schoolchildren will instinctively write poetry, given proper encouragement.

“And if you read Burns that pulse, that rhythm – they recognise it. They don’t need to be able to tell us that it’s an iambic pantameter or a sonnet, or what the rhyme scheme is. But they know enough to know that a good poem has a beat and that it must have a pulse. What I always try to emphasise to my students is the pulse in Burns. What makes him a romantic is that he’s so obviously inspired by things: to be satirical or to be joyous; to write love poetry or hate poetry. He’s a great inspired poet. And that is another means of access if you’re teaching children.”

On a shelf above a picture of the Lisbon Lions is a copy of Carruthers' Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns. It has a gorgeous cover and I’m immediately smitten as it will stand out in Zoom meetings. I ask him if it’s on general sale. “Certainly,” he says, “but it’s a wee bit pricey.”

By which I take to mean somewhere in the £25 range. But I’m on a wee trip now, zoning out to Robert Burns and I’m thinking, “why not? If I can pay 50 quid for my brand new Celtic hoodie I can spare some poppy for our national bard.”

“So that will be £130, sir, and we’ll get it ordered for you,” says the assistant in a crowded Byres Road Waterstone’s 20 minutes later. I can’t duck out of the transaction now. The prof hadn’t delivered a seminar; he’d handed down the world’s most eloquent sales pitch.