It’s Burns Night, and the Scottish bard’s poems are being declaimed all over the world. Scottish first minister Alex Salmond naturally chose this date to launch his government’s “consultation” on a 2014 referendum on Scottish independence from the United Kingdom, quoting from Burns’ great “hymn to equality,” “A Man’s a Man for a’ That.” Burns was also quoted by many of the Scottish MPs who spoke following Salmond’s announcement, and while they were talking in Edinburgh, MP Eleanor Laing and Prime Minister David Cameron traded their own Burns quotations in the English Parliament in London, during Prime Minister’s questions:

from The Scotsman:
“Scottish independence: MPs gripped by the question: was Rabbie Burns a Nat or a Unionist?,” by David Maddox
“A battle emerged in Westminster yesterday over which argument in the independence debate Scotland’s Bard Rabbie Burns would have supported as both sides tried to claim him as their own.... it was clear that, in an appeal to Scottish sentiment, both wanted a signifcant figure from Scotland’s past to help boost their support.... The day after SNP First Minister Alex Salmond declared in a major speech in London that Burns was a ‘great Nationalist and Internationalist,’ Conservative Scottish MP Eleanor Laing declared that he was a Unionist.”

In the meantime, Scots not so wrapped up in the political implications of Burns’ poems have been polled for their favorites for this Burns Night:

from EdinburghGuide.com:
Tam o’Shanter Tops Survey of Favourite Burns Poems
“Tonight, Scots around the world celebrate the birth of Scotland’s national poet Robert Burns 227 years ago, feeding spirit and mind with a traditional Scottish meal of haggis, tatties, and neeps (washed down with a dram or two) and poetry. The words of the customary ‘Address to A Haggis,’ written in 1786, will be recited at dinner tables from Cardiff to Canada and Melbourne to Mexico City. While treating poems like a horse race adds little to one’s appreciation, it’s interesting to note that a recent poll found ‘Tam o’Shanter’ (which features a racing horse) was Scotland’s favourite poem by the ‘ploughman poet’ for Burns Night.”

Other favorite Burns poems ranked in this Scottish survey were, in order:

• “A Man’s a Man for a’ that”
• “Address to A Haggis”
• “My Luve’s like a Red, Red Rose”

More on Robert Burns
Biographical Profile of Burns
Library: Poems by Burns

James Franco played him in Howl in 2010... Now Daniel Radcliffe, who grew up in front of the world in the eight Harry Potter films, will take on the role of Allen Ginsberg in a new movie, Kill Your Darlings, which tells the story of the murder committed by Lucien Carr, who was at the center of the web of Beat generation friendships that connected Ginsberg, Kerouac and Burroughs. Like Franco, Radcliffe has poetic affinities and aspirations (he even published a few poems under a pseudonym in 2009), and he believes he can portray the Beat poet at 19. We shall see... the movie comes out next year.

More films about poets and poetry

More on Allen Ginsberg:
Allen Ginsberg, Beat American Buddha Bard, by Bob Holman
Our profile of Ginsberg
The Bard His Own Self: Allen Ginsberg says “That’s all Goodnight”
Encounters with Allen Ginsberg, by Bart Plantenga

On Ginsberg’s poetry:
Allen Ginsberg’s American Sentences, an introduction to his variation on haiku
Chorus of Poets Gather for “Howl” Celebration: the 50th anniversary, an account by Teresa Conboy
You can read the poem in print or listen to it on the Internet—but you won't hear it on the radio—“Howl” (October 2007)
Hear Ginsberg’s first “Howl”—1956 recording discovered at Reed College (February 2008)
Ginsberg Howls on Indiefeed (Feburary 2009)
Howl (noun). Howl (verb). Howl, the poem heard round the world (April 2009)

A poem can contain a dangerous power—certainly some governments see poems as threats to their authority, and through the centuries many poets have been rebels, agitators and advocates—in their poems as well as their political acts. In the past few years, we’ve seen a Burmese poet sent to jail for his acrostic poem complaining about the country’s military leader, and the Nobel Peace Prize given to Liu Xiaobo, Chinese poet and democracy activist serving an 11-year prison sentence for “subversion.” Today the trend continues, with news of yet another poet arrested in China for publishing a poem urging people to make their voices heard:

It’s time
It’s time, Chinese people!
It’s time,
The square is ours,
The feet are ours,
It’s time to use our feet to go to the square and make a choice.

from The New York Times:
“Crackdown Continues on Activists in China,” by Michael Wines
“Zhu Yufu, 58, a writer and democracy advocate, was charged with subversion in Hangzhou for writing a poem that urged citizens to gather to defend their freedoms.... Mr. Zhu wrote the poem early last year, as uprisings in the Middle East led a small number of activists outside China to issue an Internet call for a ‘Jasmine Revolution.’”

More Notes on Activist Poets: From One Laureate to the Next: Who Do the Public Poets Speak For? (2011)
Outspoken Poets in the Old and New Chinas (2011)
W.S. Merwin the New American Poet Laureate (2010)
Poems of Provocation and Witness in a D.C. Festival (2008)
Ginsberg & Whitman: America’s rebel poets a century apart (2006)

Crafting the lines to be carved on a tombstone, distilling the essence of a life into a brief final statement is an innately poetic task, one that has often fallen to the poets among us. Browsing through our library of classic poems, you will discover quite a few “epitaph poems.” They may be elegies or memoirs brief enough to be etched on someone’s grave, like Ben Jonson’s “On My First Son,” a farewell to his eldest son who died of the plague at the age of seven, or Aphra Behn’s “Epitaph on the Tombstone of a Child, the Last of Seven that Died Before.” Or the epitaph may be spun out far beyond the confines of an actual tombstone into a meditation on the nature of poetry and life, like William Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph.” And of course many poets have chosen to write their own epitaphs, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Louis Stevenson and William Butler Yeats.

Being the first month of a new year, January may not seem the right time to you, dear readers, to be thinking on life’s endings. But it’s also the dead of winter—and do you know how many poets’s lives ended in the month of January? At least four, according to our friend Ed Moran—Joseph Brodsky, T.S. Eliot, Hyam Plutzik, and William Butler Yeats. Moran has explored the interconnections between the poems and epitaphs of these four in his new article for your midwinter reading pleasure: “Nothing Can Be Done, But Something Can Be Said.”

More on Poets’ Burials and Epitaphs
“Has Lorca's Final Resting Place Been Found at Last?” (2011)
“Shrines to Ted and Sylvia” (2010)
“Poe Properly Buried, 160 Years Later” (2009)