Robert Burns was a Weinsteinian sex pest, says Scottish poet who read his letters

HIS writing inspired artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians around the world and he even has an evening dedicated to his poetry and wisdom.

Yet Robert Burns has now been described as “Weinsteinian” after a letter written by the Scottish bard reemerged in which he seems to boast of raping his heavily pregnant girlfriend.

Liz Lochhead, a Scottish poet and playwright, said Burns’s “disgraceful sexual boast” exposed him as a “sex pest” and she compared him to Harvey Weinstein, the disgraced movie mogul who last week had his face slapped in a restaurant and who has been accused of sexual misconduct by scores of women. Weinstein has denied ever engaging in “non-consensual sexual conduct”.

The scandal spawned the #Metoo campaign on social media, which recently spread from the West into China. Burns’s letter, written in 1788 to Jean Armour, his girlfriend and future wife, makes him the latest person to be caught up in the scandal but with, perhaps, the most historical of accusations.

In the letter, Burns brags of jumping on a “destitute and friendless” Armour and giving her a “thundering scalade [military assault]” on a floor covered in “horse-litter” when she was pregnant with his twins.

Lochhead, who is to deliver a lecture titled Burns and Women at an evening hosted by the Scottish Hellenic Society in Glasgow at the end of this month, said: “The disgraceful sexual boast… seemed very like a rape of his heavily pregnant girlfriend. It’s very, very Weinsteinian… Burns was a genuine romantic, easily flamed to passionate love.

“He was a sex pest as well, I think. Does that mean he isn’t worth reading? It’s not really relevant.”