At this time of year, with one of the few days on the calendar given over to the celebration not of poetry, but a poet, I always find myself reading Percy Shelley’s A Defence of Poetry again – in particular his argument that the character or moral behaviour of a poet is not a factor in analysing the worth of the poetry.

Shelley writes: “Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that [Virgil] was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. It is inconsistent with this division of our subject to cite living poets, but posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins ‘were as scarlet, they are now white as snow’; they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and redeemer, Time.”

It is not so much “love the sinner but hate the sin” as “love the sonnet and ignore the sonneteer”. It found a modern iteration in Roland Barthes’ essay The Death of the Author. Biographies are the business of history, but texts are the subject of literary criticism. With Burns Night upon us, I find these ideas increasingly problematic. There is an image of Burns – a bit of a rascal, a little roguish, a naughty roister-doisterer – who nevertheless produced some of the greatest love poetry in our language. His poetry is something I have loved all my life. But here’s another r-word. Rapist.

It’s a big claim, so let’s look at the evidence. This is a letter from Burns to his friend Robert Ainslie, on 3 March 1788. Burns had returned from Edinburgh and taken up again with Jean Armour, who might be described as his common-law wife and was the mother of his children. Burns had just written one of his greatest poems, Ae Fond Kiss, for his “Clarinda”, Agnes MacLehose, whom he had been wooing in Edinburgh and whose servant he had seduced. I suppose I should now write “trigger warning”.

“Jean I found banished like a martyr – forlorn, destitute and friendless; all for the good old cause: I have reconciled her to her fate: I have reconciled her to her mother: I have taken her a room: I have taken her to my arms: I have given her a mahogany bed: I have given her a guinea; and I have f---d her till she rejoiced with joy unspeakable and full of glory. But – as I always am on every occasion – I have been prudent and cautious to an astounding degree; I swore her, privately and solemnly, never to attempt any claim on me as a husband, even though anybody should persuade her she had such a claim, which she has not, neither during my life nor after my death. She did all this like a good girl, and I took the opportunity of some dry horse litter and gave her such a thundering scalade that electrified the very marrow of her bones”.

“Scalade” is an odd word. It is a variant of the word “escalade”, which means the forceful breaching of enemy defences by ladders. It is not a word that implies consent: it appears in A Military Dictionary of 1778; and in Bishop Burnet’s Travels Through France, Italy, Germany and Switzerland of 1750 where he discusses how Geneva would have “but a short Resistance” against a scalade. Jean Armour was eight-and-a-half months pregnant when “rantin’, rovin’ Robin” so charmingly “electrified the very marrow of her bones”. The twins she was carrying were stillborn. There is no poem on their deaths.

Let us suppose that this letter is just “locker room banter”. It is still deplorable. But the facts, as Burns himself wrote, are chiels that winna ding, an’ downa be disputed. Even if it is merely braggart behaviour, I wonder why we all raise a glass to the poet whose words were sung at the opening of the Scottish parliament? The words persist, but the man is still valorised. I would suggest we should have another day to think on, and recite work by, and commend the life of another Scottish poet. It can’t be Walter Scott – unionist, opposed to the 1832 Reform Bill, had a mad plan to install Wellington as a dictator – or Stevenson – bit louche, frankly – or MacDiarmid – wee problem with his poem praising the Luftwaffe, and his longer poems praising Lenin.

So here’s the suggestion. You probably haven’t heard of Veronica Forrest-Thomson. She was born to Scots parents in Malaya in 1947, grew up in Glasgow, and studied at Liverpool and Cambridge. Her supervisor was the poet JH Prynne, and she wrote two collections, Identi-kit (1967) and Language-Games (1971), as well as a critical study Poetic Artifice that was published posthumously. A third collection, On the Periphery, appeared in 1976, the year after her death at the age of 27. Her work is oblique but not opaque, it dances around nursery rhymes, and engages the head as much as the heart. Her work, in her own words, could “summon the frightful glare of nouns and nerves”. Seek her out, instead of sentimentally praising the boor-bard of Scotland.