"He made his way as a farmer, more controversially as an exciseman, and as a literary celebrity, a favourite icon of the rising Romantic movement. Seeming contradictions pile up: the young radical and friend of smugglers ends up enforcing government revenues; the 'heav'n-taught ploughman' doubles as a literary sophisticate; while he found the soils of Ayrshire as poor as his father had, the women who crossed his path proved teemingly fertile."
Brian Morton in The Observer reviews Robert Crawford's The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography on the occasion of the poet's 250th birthday.
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