Nothing quite confers on dates a crown of cultural and monetary significance like a big fat zero on the end of a number, and the annual Burns Night this Sunday is no exception: The mushy celebration of poetry, whiskey, and haggis, which this year occurs on the 250th birthday of Robert Burns, looks to be the biggest ever. The Scottish government is attempting to convert the annual visitation of the event into actual visitation, launching a Caledonia goodwill campaign this weekend with Homecoming Scotland (the promotional campaign hopes to entice the 80 million or so folks worldwide with connections to Scotland to visit). A visit to the Web site of The Scotsman pulls up on-line ads for Burns Night Tools (promising “instant toasts in 60 seconds, 100% Refund if not satisfied”) while the newspaper itself promises its weekend readers a complimentary CD of Burns’s songs and a special issue of its magazine (who wouldn’t want to read about the “Bawdy Barn” and “the erotic poems which they tried to ban”? Sure beats the Styles section). If Scotland is the locus of these events, the missionary reach of the hagiographic jubilation is global, and one of the bigger public events scheduled for Sunday in Glasgow is “Jamaican Burns Night,” a concert by reggae titans Sly & Robbie, sponsored by Celtic Connections—a rejoinder to what the paper terms the Scottish Enlightenment’s “benign radiance” and a reminder that Burns nearly immigrated to the West Indies to take up the life of a “bookie,” or an overseer on the slave plantations of the New World.

That last fact is of interest since it doesn’t comport so cleanly with the mascot version of Burns. “His readiness to become involved in slave management may have been a sign of personal desperation; it is still shocking, and contradicts the ideology implicit and explicit in much of his poetry,” writes Robert Crawford, a poet and scholar of Scots poetry, in The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography, which Princeton University Press has just published.” “That Scotland’s bard should have been so ready to become part of the system of slavery is one of the most striking indications of how complicit Scotland was in the slave trade.” There are worse things than turning a poet into a mascot for tourist boards and golf-course owners, but Crawford’s biography is a most welcome antidote to the snuggly image of the “heaven-taught ploughman.”

Crawford’s The Bard attempts a 21st-century portrait of Burns: where 19th-century biographers “shaped misleading … presentations of Burns, making him safe for many an imperialist’s dinner or parlour ornament,” recent efforts haven’t helped either in creating a good sense of what made Burns so radical to begin with. Crawford’s picture of Burns implicates the Ayrshire poet in the politics of his time. You see what was at stake in the Burns of 1784 and his “fork-tongued encoding” in support of the American revolutionaries in the ballad “When Guilford Good Our Pilot Stood,” a position that was all the more daring given the real damage the war in the colonies had done to his local economy. Among other things, it had ruined the lucrative tobacco trade that enriched the area around Ayr; familiarly enough, he wrote in the aftermath of the collapse of Douglas, Heron, the Ayr bank whose loans to companies involved in American and West Indies trade went sour and dragged the Scottish economy down with it.

The compositions of 1784 and 1785 are unsparing in their wit and deadly in their aim: Crawford provides close readings of Burns’s indictment of religious hypocrisy, the “rigidly right,” and the criminalization of sex in his “Holy Tulzie” and “Holy Willie’s Prayer” and “Address to the Unco Guid” (“Scots dynamite” earthed in the “world of ‘Kail and potatoes’ “). Burns’s Love and Liberty, a Cantata, his celebration of “lowlife free-love, drink, popular poetry, and rebellion,” is impossible to see in Crawford’s description without understanding the social dynamics of the little town of Mauchline and the anarchic blackguard voices that make up the composition’s chorus. As much a life of Burns, this is a history of actual places and actual personages, and one that reminds us too of their hard reality (entertainingly so, it must happily be said). But beyond providing the immediate context for Burns’s practice as a poet, Crawford writes about Burns the way a poet should, giving a history of Burns’s reading, the great effort at which he happily toiled to fuse his immersive interest in sources as disparate as Alexander Pope, Adam Smith, Robert Fergusson, sentimental histories of Hannibal, and the bardic work of Ossian, and the formal achievement of his own verse: “His turn to Standard Habbie and the vernacular language of Lowland Scotland was as crucial for his ear as the discovery of long lines and a ‘barbaric yawp’ would be for Walt Whitman in the following century.”

Crawford’s biography is a generous and timely work—it isn’t hero worship, and it is forthright (and amusing) about the hustling self-promotion of the man who crowned himself “King of the Bards.” (His mapping of the often-confusing sexual territory of Burns is the work of an assiduous surveyer.) In short, it’s a terrific tribute to the short life of an unlikely celebrity-poet. Take along a copy to your Burns Supper; just make sure not to spill any haggis on the cover.