Quote Originally Posted by Raphael View Post
I have seen many of you have attended Burns night Supper in the recent weeks and I wonder what does that mean to you. Is this just a social event for you or are you doing it to celebrate the poet's life and his influence on Scotland.

I am not going to lie and say that I go to the annual supper because of Burns. I go to the dinner because it is an annual social event and it is also a fund raiser. Although I doubt that I will continue my involvement in the future years as I no longer believe in that fund raiser any more. I also don't read poetry because I don't understand them.
As a teacher of the English language, and one of Scottish ancestry, I must say that I actually like Burns--but I do enjoy the general Scottishness of the event. I should say that I like Burns' poetry rather... I find him as a man to be pretty base--but I'm a moralist prude I suppose. (I was disappointed when he was dubbed the "greatest Scot of all time".) Nevertheless, he was a poetic genius and I love the lyrics and verses he wrote. I LOVE giving the Address to the Haggis every year and I've tried my best to make it different and more exciting every year that I've done it.

I'm afraid at our Burns Night, there is not enough of his poetry recited--the past two years my father and I tend to be the only ones who've done anything actually honoring the Bard with reference to his works. But at least it's a heck of a lot more interesting than the St. Andrew's Dinner that's given every year. That's a total snooze fest and I have only gone when I was specifically invited to receive some sort of award/scholarship. But I digress...
Burns isn't that hard to understand for me, but I enjoy translating languages and I have a degree in English. So I'm not the typical person. But I think someone mentioned that people these days don't stop long enough to read and enjoy poetry... Burns Night is a good night to do that, but the problem is that so often, the readers stumble desperately over the language and haven't a clue as to what they're saying. A lot of it is about performance... tell them what the poem is saying and then recite the poem with gusto and panache!