I once went in search of the Burns who mattered to people. It was a good few winters ago, and rain had frozen to snow, which lay thick on the ground of Alloway the day I arrived. The whole of Alloway is now more or less given over to something called the Burns National Heritage Park. However grim the Burns family cottage was in 1759, it could hardly be any worse than it is now. The room where the Burns family sat together is cold and Calvinist: no crack of light or laughter there. Wooden dolls stand around a table, being taught all the good ways by a bigger doll in the shape of Burns's father.

You see relics of his early education: a Bible and a book of English essayists; bits of French and Latin. Then there are artefacts relating to the life of a young man, a romancer and a hard worker: his razor and shaving mirror, his drinking vessels, his pendants, his pens and proof of their various productions.

As you look over these bits and bobs, a motion picture of Burns's life begins to roll. Born in that barn outside the museum, it was no time at all before the young Robert went wandering by the River Afton with his finger on his chin. The family moved to Mount Oliphant farm - not far away - when he was 7. An indication of the way things were to be came when Robert spied a blacksmith's daughter, Nellie Kilpatrick, and wrote a poem about how she'd captured his heart. His walks through Ayrshire brought further poems, chiefly about the things that caught his eye, and chiefly in the Scottish dialect.

He joined a dancing class at Tarbolton (to meet girls); he formed the Bachelors' Club (to meet his pals); he became a Freemason; and he tried to learn the trade of flax dressing at Irvine, ten miles along the coast. Tales of affairs follow: girls getting pregnant; advances sought and sometimes rebuffed; troubles with the Kirk because of all his carry-on.

We hear of his plans for emigration to Jamaica; his attempts to marry Jean Armour and his repudiation by her father; his loss of the adored Highland Mary, who may have died in childbirth; his shelving of the Jamaica plans; and his triumphant debut with the Kilmarnock Poems. Burns made it in Edinburgh, where he'd gone on a borrowed donkey, but ventured home to poverty months later. He took a lease on a hopeless farm called Ellisland; he became an exciseman; his wife had more children, and so did women who were not his wife (Mrs Burns said that “Our Robin shoulda hud twa wives”).

He started collecting old Scots songs, and rewriting them, for publication; he fell in and out with friends; he fell foul of gossip-mongers and idiots, who ruined his chances of advancement in the Excise; he dissipated a bit, though probably not as much as people said at the time. He liked a drink. He had a bad heart - a doctor thought to cure it by having him wade in the Solway Firth. But he died, aged 37, in a house up a scabby lane in Dumfries. He was feverish and ravaged, his heart was in bits, and there was hardly a penny in the house.

This is a little of what we know about Robert Burns. The episodes are like scenes in an overblown drama, and each is captured in the portraits and pocketbooks of the Burns Museum. Out in the foyer were many of the productions of Burns's incredible afterlife: shortbread and haggis, tea towels and trays.

Is there something special about Burns, that he so lends himself to commercial enterprise? It may be not because of his localness, or because he is sexually and politically explosive, or because he is difficult and strange, but because he is pure and direct. Burns can seem to be universal. He can seem a pure lover, a pure worker, a pure patriot, a pure loyalist, a pure man of nature. He can seem to mean nothing, and only to feel. He knew this himself: it could be argued that it was Burns who began the process of turning himself into an “easy listening” poet.

There are now two classes of people who recognise the name Robert Burns: those who think he has lovely things to say about daisies, and those who seek to bring out the troubled wisdom of his work, to rescue it, and let it do its damage in these damaged times. These two groups are often at odds over Burns, but they share a powerful set of sentiments about this ghost of a national poet, in that ghost of a nation.

© Andrew O'Hagan, 2008.

Edited extract from A Night Out With Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems
Canongate, £12.99, 225pp

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