Burns is celebrated as Scotland’s national bard, and the ‘cult of Burns’ is an integral part of Scottish cultural identity. Inspired by 18th-century poets Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson, Burns became the leading voice in the ‘Vernacular Revival’ of Scots language poetry in post-Union Scotland. He was also one of main collector and editors of traditional Scottish music.

As a self-professed patriot and ‘sentimental Jacobite’, Burns venerated national heroes such as Robert the Bruce, William Wallace and Bonnie Prince Charlie. We can also see a central part played by Burns in the ‘invention’ of Scottish national identity in the Romantic period and beyond, from the ‘romanticisation’ of the Highlands (which he toured in 1787) through to the making of national symbols out of whisky and haggis.

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It is perhaps for such reasons that Burns has been appropriated as a leading icon of the tartan tourist industry. However, his iconic status as ‘alpha Scot’ may conceal a more nuanced Scottishness. Burns wrote and spoke very well in English, the language of his schooling and of the Presbyterian religion in which he was raised.

He composed cultivated letters on the model of the finest examples Augustan prose, and his favourite authors included English authors such as Joseph Addison and William Shenstone as well as ‘Anglo-Scots’ James Thomson and James Beattie. The patriot bard sang about and against such things as the Union of 1707 and the deposed Stewart monarchy, but he also wrote the ‘pro-British’ song ‘The Dumfries Volunteers’, named after the volunteer regiment in which he served as part of a wider British response to the threat of French invasion in the 1790s.

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The poet and critic Edwin Muir (1887–1959) once remarked that Burns is “to the respectable, a decent man; to the Rabelaisian, bawdy; to the sentimentalist, sentimental; to the socialist, a revolutionary; to the nationalist, a patriot; to the religious, pious”.

Such mixed messages as people find in Burns’s writing have encouraged different groups to attempt to appropriate him for different cultural and political purposes, including recruitment into the British Army during the First World War through to the referendum for Scottish Independence in 2014, in which both sides claimed that Burns would have voted for their side if he were still alive.

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We may ask which way Burns would have voted were he around today, but we often forget that political life was very different in the poet’s own day, that party politics was not as ideologically polarised as today, and that Burns would not even have been entitled to vote in what was still a pre-democratic country. Alas, we may never know how Burns would have felt about Brexit.

Burns’s own political views are difficult to unpick, although he has been frequently appropriated for progressive politics, even to the extent of being hailed a proto-socialist or celebrated in such places as the former Soviet Union. We divine progressive values in his celebration of ordinary life and his satire of social hierarchy, as exemplified in the radical anthem ‘A Man’s a Man for a’ That’.

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An early version of this song appeared in the short-lived radical Glasgow Magazine of 1795, when the mood for political reform was high, and the repressive measures enacted against ‘sedition’ excessive. Though a friend to reform, Burns published his sentiments anonymously: as an exciseman and therefore a government employee, he had to maintain an outward show of loyalty to King George.

‘A Man’s a Man’ was later sung at the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, showing how a song that challenged the political establishment of his own day could be appropriated to speak for the political establishment of another time.

A number of Burns’s poems and songs were suppressed during his lifetime, and not just for their political content. These include songs on more risqué topics.

Burns wrote a considerable number of ‘bawdy’ or obscene verses which were not published while he was alive, and which had a less than straightforward route to publication. Earlier editors such as James Currie, for example, tried to distance the poet from his pornographic poems, while obscenity laws (which were not relaxed until the late-20th century) prevented their widespread publication.

Even though standards may be relatively lax today, Burns’s bawdy poems still have the power to shock with their explicit language and frank description of sex. One important collection of the bard’s bawdry was The Merry Muses of Caledonia, penned by the poet for the Crochallan Fencibles, a male drinking club to which Burns belonged and which met at a tavern in Anchor Close in Edinburgh.

Containing titles such as ‘The Fornicator’ and ‘Nine Inch Will Please a Lady’, The Merry Muses was not published in Burns’s lifetime and for a long time only appeared in privately published volumes to be circulated among a “discreet” male audience.