Robert Burns was Scotland's greatest poet and many would say that he was the world's greatest ever poet.

Burns was born at Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland on 25 January 1759 and died in Dumfries on 21 July 1796.

In less than 37 years of life he accomplished more than most people do in a normal lifetime.

His great popularity with the Scots lies in his ability to depict with loving accuracy the life of his
fellow rural Scots, as he did in The Cotter’s Saturday Night. His use of dialect brought a stimulating,
much-needed freshness and raciness into British poetry but Burns’s greatness extends beyond the
limits of dialect. His poems are written about Scots, but, in tune with the rising humanitarianism of his
day, they apply to a multitude of universal problems. Socialists, communists, atheists and anarchists all claim that Robert Burns was one of their founding fathers.