Of the republic of uzbekistan andizhan state university faculty of foreign languages department of grammar and practical course of the english language

Thus Burns became a conscious participant in the antiquarian and cultura
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movement to gather and preserve evidences of Scottish identity before they were obliterated in the cultural drift toward English language and culture. Burns’s clear preference for traditional culture, and particularly for the freedom it represented, shifted intensity and direction because of the Edinburgh experience. He narrowed his focus from all of traditional culture to one facet—song. Balladry and song were safe artifacts that could be captured on paper and sanitized for polite edification. This approach to traditional culture was distanced and conscious, while his earlier depiction of the larger whole of traditional culture had been immediate, intimate, and largely unconscious. Thus Edinburgh changed his artistic stance, making him more clearly aware of choices and directions as well as a conscious antiquarian.
In all, Burns had a hand in some 330 songs for Johnson’s The Scots Musical Museum (1787-1803), a six-volume work, and for George Thomson’s five-volume A Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs for the Voice (1793-1818). As a nationalistic work, The Scots Musical Museum was designed to reflect Scottish popular taste; like similar publications, it included traditional songs—texts and tunes—as well as songs and tunes by specific authors and composers. Burns developed a coded system of letters for identifying contributors, suggesting to all but the cognoscenti that the songs were traditional. It is often difficult to separate Burns’s work from genuinely traditional texts; he may, for example, have edited and polished the old Scots ballad “Tam Lin,” which tells of a man restored from fairyland to his human lover. Many collected texts received a helping hand fragments were filled out, refrains and phrases were amalgamated to make a whole—and original songs in the manner of tradition were created anew. Burns’s song output was enormous and uneven, and he knew it: “Here, once for all, let me apologies for many silly compositions of mine in this work. Many beautiful airs wanted
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words.” Yet many of the songs are succinct masterpieces on love, on the
brotherhood of man, and on the dignity of the common man—subjects which link Burns with oral and popular tradition on the one hand and on the other with the societal changes that were intensifying distinctions between people.
Burns was a man of great intellectual energy and force of character who, in a class-ridden society, never found an environment in which he could fully exercise his personality. It may be argued that Scottish culture in his day was incapable of providing an intellectual background that could replace the Calvinism that Burns rejected, or that Burns’s talent was squandered on an Edinburgh literati that, according to English critics, were second-raters. Yet he lived during the cultural and intellectual tumult known as the Scotish Enlightenment, and the problem was ultimately more than one of personalities. The only substitute for the rejected Calvinism seemed to be, for Burns, a sentimental Deism, a facile belief in the good heart as all, and this was arguably not a creed rich or complex enough to nourish great poetry. That Burns in spite of this produced so much fine poetry shows the strength of his unique genius, and that he has become the Scottish national poet is a tribute to his hold on the popular imagination.
Burns perhaps exhibited his greatest poetic powers in his satires. There is also a remarkable craftsmanship in his verse letters, which display a most adroit counterpointing of the colloquial and the formal. But it is by his songs that Burns is best known, and it is his songs that have carried his reputation round the world.
Burns wrote all his songs to known tunes, sometimes writing several sets of words to the same air in an endeavor to find the most apt poem for a given melody. Many songs which, it is clear from a variety of evidence, must have

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been substantially written by Burns he never claimed as his. He never claimed “Auld Lang Syne” for example, which he described simply as an old fragment he had discovered, but the song we have is almost certainly his, though the chorus and probably the first stanza are old. (Burns wrote it for a simple and moving old air that is not the tune to which it is now sung, as Thomson set it to another tune.) The full extent of Burns’s work on Scottish songs will probably never be known.

Most of Burns’s poems were written in Scots. They document and celebrate traditional Scottish culture, expressions of farm life, and class and religious distinctions. Burns wrote in a variety of forms: epistles to friends, ballads, and songs. His best-known poem is the mock-heroic Tam o’ Shanter. He is also well known for the over three hundred songs he wrote which celebrate love, friendship, work, and drink with often hilarious and tender sympathy. Burns died on July 21, 1796, at the age of thirty-seven. Even today, he is often referred to as the National Bard of Scotland.