As Political Editor for BBC Scotland, Brian Taylor is probably used to a bit of crowd-control. Not that his three guests, Professor Robert Crawford, Andy Hall, or Dr. Donald Smith intended mischief. But their obvious enthusiasm for and delight in Robert Burns, man and work carried them along, and the audience in the Highland Park Spiegeltent went with them all the way.
Crawford, author of The Bard, a detailed study of Burns and an accomplished poet himself, stressed the continuing influence of Burns on Scottish and non-Scottish writers alike, and his clear sympathies for democratic and republican principles, although for a number of possible reasons, the words themselves hardly occur in his writings.
Perhaps partly because of these principles, Burns remains essentially human as well as humane, more approachable because he is so clearly flawed. As Crawford puts it, he "resists the imposition of grandeur".
Andy Hall's attempt to do justice to the immoral memory is simpler and yet more complex than Crawford's biography. In Touched by Burns, the Stonehaven-based photographer invited Scots and non-Scots to reflect on how Burns' poetry had affected them. So Maya Angelou and Dr. Tom Sutherland, the latter captive for some six and a half years in Lebanon give expression to ways in which Burns' work has affected them in different, trying circumstances.
Dr. Donald Smith, already the author of God, The Poet and The Devil, a study of aspects of religion in the work of Burns, has turned his hand to a novel, Between Ourselves, covering Burns time in Edinburgh. Smith conceded that the novel was a fusion of known fact, conjecture and pure fiction, illustrating this with three extracts, only one of which was completely based in reality.
As might be expected, questions from the floor were lively and mostly pertinent. They ranged across Burns Jacobite and Jacobin sympathies, the considerable influence of his father, William, a dissenting Ulsterman of deep and wide learning, and the significance of Burns in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.
That a contemporary poet of stature, Seamus Heaney, saw fit to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Burns' birth, and in the Ulster Scots of Burns' father is perhaps indication enough of the influence Burns still has on us all.
Copyright Bill Dunlop 2009
First published on EdinburghGuide.com 2009