The footprints of Robert Burns

Scotland today celebrates its national poet, but for Andrew O'Hagan, Burns doesn't so much represent Scotland as act as a dazzling convenor of its contradictions

Scotland has always wished its great writers to be men of the people - even if those writers were not that way inclined - but few in any language had such a natural instinct as did Robbie Burns for commonality and inclusion. Of course, a culture as interesting as Scotland's can hold in its mind two equal and opposite views of genius - Boswell and Burns, indeed, had both within himself, the high and the low, the wild and the decorous - but the popularity of Burns may be a testament to our lust for plain speaking.

The national poet hated unfairness and the abuse of power, that is his signature, giving intellectual and emotional life to notions of common sense and the common good. After Burns's death, it was Boswell's son Alexander who saw full well what his father had missed, and he raised the subscription for the famous Burns monument at Alloway.

Can a single poet summon the essence of a nation? Does Goethe do it for Germany? Pushkin for Russia? Whitman for the United States? Heaney for Ireland? What are we asking of a poet when we imagine them representative souls of nations formed out of chaos and motivated by difference?

Today is the day when people all over the world will raise a cup of kindness to the memory of Scotland's Robert Burns, the very notion of the Burns Supper being a testament to supreme notions of his conviviality.

Yet Burns was never representative of a single Scotland (as if there was one), so much as a dazzling convenor of its hot contradictions - he was Jacobin and Jacobite, church-wrecker and servant of piety, revolutionary thinker and tax man, love poet and adulterer, Scottish patriot and admirer of English prose who dreamed of a better life in Jamaica.

We love Burns not for his consistencies or even for his convictions, but for the sound of his mind and the very lilt of his humanness. It wasn't a legislator or a party animal who wrote a Marseillaise to the human spirit, but a farmer's son from Ayrshire with an uncanny connection with people's cares and people's wishes for a better life.

"It's coming yet for a' that," he wrote, "that man to man the whole world o'er/ Shall brothers be for a' that."

I fell in love with Burns at the age of 11. My school was only 10 miles away from his birthplace, and I remember reading him in my bedroom with the rain against the window. With my first typewriter I sat and typed the whole of Tam O'Shanter, trying to understand the turns and periods in the poem, the source of the narrative's urgency and comedy and truth.

Mrs Ferguson, our headmistress, spotted me for a convert and one January 25th, she forced me to sing My Love She's But a Lassie, Yet in front of the whole school, next to an old piano, upon which she bashed out the tune and refused my blushes.

The Heckling Shop, a place in Irvine, two miles away, where Burns had gone in 1781 to learn flax dressing, became a haunt of mine. I loved looking at the swish of his handwriting on old manuscripts and imagining the night when the shop burned down, the local children throwing snowballs into the fire in an attempt to put it out.

To care about a writer is a life's work. It can stand adjacent to your own tasks and efforts, somehow enlivening your sense of what it means to converse with the dead as well as the living. There are writers who have much more in common with Robert Burns than I do - by being poets, for a start, and vernacular heroes, too - and I can only say my connection with him is based not on what he says to me about Scotland but about how much of the world he inhabits.

I love his Scottish words and rhythms - I hear them in my sleep - and I feel I know the very flowers and skies and muddy smears of his landscape. But the facility of address that makes Burns great relies in a skill which language and rhythm alone cannot manage: what he possesses, for all the perfection of accent and precision of speech, is a quality of empathy that radiates from everything touched by his imagination.

His affections are so well tuned as to the inner dignity of things that he can politicise the plight of a mouse caught in the rain. Shakespeare could do it, but would he not make a great meal of it, a maelstrom of yapping philosophies, whilst Burns simply reaches out to touch its whiskers?

"That wee-bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,

Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou's turn'd out, for a' thy trouble,

But house or hald,

To thole the Winter's sleety dribble,

And cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou art no thy-lane,

In proving foresight may be vain:

The best laid schemes o' Mice an Men,

Gang aft agley,

An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,

For promis'd joy!

Still, thou art blest, compared wi' me!

The present only toucheth thee:

But Och! I backward cast my e'e,

On prospects drear!

An' forward, tho' I canna see,

I guess an' fear!"

Literature is not a compendium of special effects or a log of political attitudes, but a repository of human vision, and Robert Burns compels readers of his work into a completely subjective realisation of their own capacity for fellowship. It was the American poet Wallace Stevens who said that the open-minded reading of poetry helps you to live your life, and in Burns's hands the reader comes away humanised, better equipped to tolerate one's own failings and appreciate the world's glories.

With such a writer, language and rhythm become a kind of benediction, allowing you to see the world as a universal pattern of suffering and joy, caught in this native music that seems born of a single man and his beautiful orchestration of traditions. People might not describe this as what they're getting when their cheek flames to the sound of Robert Burns, but that's his genius, too: we thrill to feel things and not know why.

In many countries this is a kind of politics. It was in the England of William Wordsworth. It was in the India of Tagore. It was in the America of James Baldwin and it is now in the Turkey of Orhan Pamuk. No more than these writers should Burns be forced to represent nationalism or rude ideology - that is not the way in which he is political, but more, much more, in the subtle manners of his comprehension when it comes to human freedom.

Burns spoke in ways that not only defend the rights of the human imagination, but which embody that freedom in the manner of its defence. We destroy the inner grace of the work if we make him speak for politicians, because his heart, his ear, his magnificent eye, they were trained on more mysterious and less passing principles. We know this about Shakespeare and we know it about Yeats, but we sometimes have difficulty remembering it about Robert Burns.

Great poetry can vanish the distance between one living thing and another. It can also syncopate a moral honesty without saying why or without knowing how. Burns makes readers understand the meaning of their own tolerance; the poems can also bring a person into company with the colours of their own voice, showing that reader how they may live imaginatively. That is the deepest service of art, and with Burns it comes with a pat on the arm and a virtual drink.

Of course, camaraderie must now compete with alienation in the battle to swell the breast of a modern reader, but Burns has no rival when it comes to giving life to the capacity for hope, even if hope means merely the right to ask whom in the world you really are.

"The way Burns sounded," writes Seamus Heaney, "his choice of words, his rhymes and metaphors, all that collapsed the distance I expected to feel between myself and the schoolbook poetry I encountered first at Anahorish Elementary School . . . He did not fail the Muse or us or himself as one of poetry's chosen instruments."

We're in a period that doesn't favour difficulty, and Burns's language is sometimes difficult, so rather than complain about falling standards, editors must produce editions that find new ways of drawing out the poet's innate accessibility. Readers who care about good writing are nevertheless daunted at the idea of 800 poems and songs by an 18th-century master, and I was dismayed a couple of years ago to learn how little Burns was actually being read.

I set out to produce an edition of the 40 greatest poems with a narrative introduction, a lively glossary and a personal preface to each of the chosen poems. We relied on the notion that Robert Burns, perhaps more than any other great poet, might suffer to be entertained by some personal camaraderie in the company of a junior writer of prose. That is our response, anyhow, to the problem of canonical writers being left for dead in the pages of bulky books, when an opportunity exists to bring out the compelling aliveness of the writing.

If our poet is the prince of commonality, then A Night Out With Robert Burns is a love letter to the common reader. There will always be academics to fight over what Burns did and didn't mean, what he did and didn't write, whilst the everyday lover of good writing stands apart and wonders at the basic fuss. But I grew up knowing that Robert Burns was not merely Scotland's gift to the world, but humanity's gift to Scotland, and at every pass I have found him full of exemplary wit and vitality.

There were times when this dead writer seemed more alive to me than my parents - is this what we mean by a writer speaking to us down the years? Other times he seemed more concerned for the problems of life than any of my friends. He seemed more relaxed about failure than any of my teachers. Up in the wards, when my daughter was born, and the London traffic seemed to hush the crowds in lieu of this brand new person, I thought of Robert Burns' first love poem as I looked into her face.

"O once I lov'd a bonnie lass,

An' aye I love her still,

An' whilst that virtue warms my breast

I'll love my handsome Nell."

Great poets follow us, long after we followed them, and they linger like spies in the shadows of the unknowable. Now and then we turn in an empty street and see them light a match: perhaps, we say, you were my best friend all along. You shadowed me.

That is not to suggest that poetry is always a source of comfort, but merely to say it is always a source of presence. Robert Burns is not God, but something nicer than God, a man like us, who may have died for nobody but who lived for something. That is my argument, anyhow, and we writers who truly love other writers must love them very extravagantly; if nothing else, it makes up for the horror of knowing we can never be like them.

A Night Out With Robert Burns: The Greatest Poems, arranged by Andrew O'Hagan, is published by Canongate at £12.99. Andrew O'Hagan's most recent novel is Be Near Me (2006).