[Low has edited two well-regarded books on Burns, Robert Burns: The Critical Heritage (1974) and Critical Essays on Robert Burns (1975). In the following essay, he provides a brief overview of Burns's career as a poet.]

Robert Burns, the eldest son of a tenant farmer in Ayrshire, Scotland, grew up to a life of hard physical work, poverty, and acute awareness of social disadvantage. It was to find 'some kind of counterpoise' to this harsh set of circumstances, and to amuse himself by transcribing 'the various feelings, the loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fears, in his own breast', that he began to write poetry. By his mid-twenties he displayed exceptional mastery of both satire and lyric in Lowland Scots. In the summer of 1786, when he was on the point of abandoning farming in Scotland and emigrating to the West Indies, he published his first collection of poems, in an edition of 612 copies printed in the country town of Kilmarnock. Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect met with such success that he changed all his plans, and journeyed to Edinburgh, where he was enthusiastically welcomed by a number of leading literary figures, partly because the quality of his work appeared to confirm current primitivist theories of genius. Among them was Henry Mackenzie, whose sentimental novel The Man of Feeling Burns had long admired and claimed to prize 'next to the Bible'. In an influential essay in his periodical The Lounger, Mackenzie praised the 'power of genius' of 'this Heaven-taught ploughman', and he helped Burns arrange publication of an expanded edition of his Poems in the spring of 1788.

With the money he earned from publication, Burns toured the Scottish Borders and Highlands, and spent a second winter in Edinburgh. Eventually he returned, somewhat reluctantly, to tenant farming in south-west Scotland. He combined excise work with farming for a time, then became a full-time excise officer in Dumfries. His most famous poem, 'Tam o' Shanter', was written in 1790, but for the most part he devoted the leisure hours of his later years to the writing and collecting of Scottish songs, in which he was passionately interested. From 1788 until his death he was the principal contributor to and virtual editor of the greatest of all Scottish song collections, James Johnson's Scots Musical Museum (6 vols, 1787-1803). He also supplied the words of many songs for George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (5 vols, 1793-1818), which boasted among its musical contributors Haydn and Beethoven. In all, he wrote some 200 songs.

Burns admired the poetry of Gray, Goldsmith and Shenstone, as well as the sentimental prose of his fellow countrymen Henry Mackenzie and James Macpherson. His reading in the literature of sentiment profoundly influenced him. Its effects can be seen in such poems as 'To a Mountain Daisy' and 'The Cotter's Saturday Night', both of which greatly appealed to his contemporaries; in many of his songs; and in his rather stilted letters. He was at his best, however, in satires such as 'The Holy Fair' and 'Address to the Deil', or when the expression of sentimental ideas was controlled and balanced by his fund of common sense and down-to-earth humour, as for instance in his Scots verse epistles and mock elegies. 'What an antithetical mind!' exclaimed Byron, 'tenderness, roughness—delicacy, coarseness—sentiment, sensuality—soaring and grovelling, dirt and deity—all mixed up in that one compound of inspired clay!'

Burns was indebted both to 'polite' literature in English and to a vernacular oral tradition which is often homely and as often racy. What makes him exceptionally interesting is that, like all major writers, he makes up his own rules and defies facile categorising. Thus in one mood he harks back to the robust values and belief in clarity of Pope, his greatest eighteenth-century predecessor in poetic satire; in another he writes sentimentally, almost as if cast in the role of Harley, Mackenzie's Man of Feeling; and every so often—arguably while obeying his deepest artistic instinct—he anticipates the energy and cutting edge of full-blown Romantic protest. It is, above all, in song that his combination of simplicity, real personal feeling and memorable phrasing places him with the Romantics. 'A Man's a Man for A' That', for example, bears the stamp of his mind no less clearly than The Marriage of Heaven and Hell has that of Blake. Like nearly all his songs, it was given to the world casually and anonymously; but its powerfully direct assertion of Burns's vision of shared humanity and anticipated social and political change has carried it round the world, along with love songs such as 'Ae Fond Kiss' and the now traditional song of parting, 'Auld Lang Syne'.

Wordsworth more than once acknowledged a debt to Burns, writing in one poem of the particular sadness he felt when the Scottish poet died at the age of thirty-seven: