Robert Burns, a Scottish poet, was born in Alloway, Ayrshire, Scotland, on January 25, 1759. He received little formal education, but he enjoyed reading and he became familiar with the writings of such authors as Dryden, Milton, and Shakespeare. Burns worked long hours with his father, a tenant farmer. The frustration of watching his father's struggles on the farm is said to have inspired his satirical poetry. When his father died in 1784, Burns moved the family to the farm Mossgiel about one mile north of the town of Mauchline. Here he continued to work as a farmer and to write poetry. In 1786 Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect was published, which described the existence of the Scottish peasant. Burns's popularity was immediate, if short-lived. After a brief period of fame in Edinburgh, Burns returned to Ayrshire. Burns married Jean Armour in 1788. They moved first to a farm in Ellisland, then to Dumfries, where Burns worked as a tax inspector. In addition to his poetry, Burns is well known for his songwriting. He worked with James Johnson on a project to revise old Scottish tunes and created some new songs of his own. Some favorites include Auld Lang Syne, To a Mountain Daisy, and Tam o' Shanter. Robert Burns died of rheumatic fever on July 21, 1796, at the age of 37.
Robert Creeley was born in Arlington, Massachusetts, on May 21, 1926. He attended Harvard University and served in the American Field Service in India and Burma during World War II. In 1960, he received a Master's Degree from the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. He taught at Black Mountain College, an experimental arts college in North Carolina, and was the editor of the Black Mountain Review. During his lifetime, he published more than sixty books of poetry including For Love: Poems 1950-1960, The Finger, Later, Mirrors, Memory Gardens, Echoes, Life and Death, and If I Were Writing This. In 1960, he won the Levinson Prize for a group of 10 poems published in Black Mountain Review. He also won the Shelley Memorial Award in 1981, the Frost Medal in 1987, and the Lannan Lifetime Achievement Award. He served as New York State Poet Laureate from 1989 to 1991. He also wrote the novel The Island and a collection of short stories entitled The Gold Diggers. He edited several books including Charles Olson's Selected Poems, The Essential Burns, and Whitman: Selected Poems. He taught English at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque and at the State University of New York at Buffalo. He died on March 30, 2005 at the age of 78.
