There has long been a vast gulf between the Robert Burns of popular lore—the untaught farmer’s son who penned touching love songs and a variety of quaint poems about homely things like mice—and the Burns known to scholars and biographers: the intermittently radical, psychologically unstable sexual libertine. In the preface to the 1960 edition of his work on Burns, the late David Daiches complained that “in spite of advances in scholarship and criticism, the same sentimental rubbish about Burns tends to be spouted forth each year by hundreds of Burns Night orators.” For generations, Burns scholars have scorned Henry Mackenzie’s description of Burns as a “heaven-taught ploughman.” He wasn’t taught by heaven or any other supernal force, but by his excellent young tutor, John Murdoch, who taught him English poetry and French instead of Greek.

And yet, there’s something to Mackenzie’s phrase. For one thing, Burns was a ploughman. By the age of fifteen, as his brother Gilbert recalled, Robert was the principal laborer of the family farm, since their father had deteriorated too much to carry out the most demanding tasks. And no regime of high-quality tutoring could explain why a teenager from rural Ayrshire could compose verses whose rhymes and diction strike the ear as utterly natural:

Not vernal showers to budding flow’rs,
Not Autumn to the Farmer,
So dear can be, as thou to me,
My fair, my lovely Charmer!

As a young man,