If you are reading this through red-rimmed eyes and pounding headache, then the words may yet be skirling around in your head. “Should auld acquaintance be forgot,/and never brought to mind?”

Robert Burns's famous song is the world's most widely recited poem. Most midnight revellers know only the first verse and the chorus, and for 364 days of the year it is never brought to mind. But for one night, everyone slurs it. This is as nearly universal as a song gets.

Burns described Auld Lang Syne as “the old song of the olden times” and claimed that he “took it down from an old man's singing”, which suggests that long before he wrote the official version Scots were collapsing into flowerbeds with this catchy, comforting anthem of friendship on their lips.

“Light lie the turf on the breast of the heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment!”, wrote Burns. The heaven-inspired poet was Burns himself.

This month is the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth. As we head deeper into a grim recession the world has never had more need of Robert Burns, for the “ploughman poet” is the bard for hard times: satirical, bawdy, optimistic and humane, with a deep understanding that money and status are just trinkets compared to fellowship, love and laughter.

Burns is Scotland's poet (indeed, he is claimed by just about everyone of every political persuasion in Scotland, which has led to multiple Burns), but he has a status in world culture that is unique.

Burns Night is celebrated throughout the world on January 25. There are more statues dedicated to Burns in North America than to any other writer. Russia, which issued a commemorative stamp to the poet in 1954, claims to have more Burns societies than Scotland, and an annual Burns Night supper is held inside the Kremlin and broadcast live on Russian television.

No other cultural or literary figure is celebrated on a single day in the same way. Burns has been translated into every known language. His poetry admired by Mozart and Bob Dylan, set to music by Haydn and Michael Jackson, two centuries apart. The tune of Auld Lang Syne was once the national anthem of Korea. James Stewart belts it out in the closing scene of It's a Wonderful Life.

Burns was a champion of individual freedom and a sharp political commentator - passionate, scurrilous, tender and uplifting in adversity. Tom Sutherland endured six years as a hostage in Beirut by remembering and reciting Burns poems to himself. Opponents of Robert Mugabe look to Burns in their battle against the Zimbabwean dictator. Abraham Lincoln's oratory, and to some extent his egalitarian views, were shaped by reading and memorising the Scottish poet.

In the words of Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations: “Burns's poems dignify and illuminate in the struggle faced by the vast majority of the world's population today.”

Burns despised the trappings of wealth, the pompous airs of rank, the blindness of human vanity: “O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/to see oursels as others see us!” Born in a barn, he died poor, and in between he celebrated the honour and pride of having little. “We dare be poor for a' that!” As the hedge funds are scythed down and the economy totters, Burns offers a fine reminder that shared humanity and fellowship is the only real treasure. “A Man's a Man for a' that”: as a motto for 2009, one could not find better.

He would have mocked our cult of money that came before the crunch. “To crouch in the train of mere stupid wealth,” he wrote, “I hold to be prostitution... in anyone that is not born a slave.” He knew boom and bust from personal experience: financially irresponsible and sexually incontinent, when he died at the age of 37 Burns may have left as many as 16 children, by numerous women, and just £15 in bank drafts to his widow.

Some of Burns's poetry is sentimental and trite, fit only to decorate tea-towels and shortbread tins. A huge Burns celebration is planned for Homecoming Scotland 2009, as the country seeks to turn its national bard into hard cash with some 300 Burns-themed events, from fishing competitions to concerts to whisky tastings.

But strip away the commercial clutter and the tartan-draped tourist traps, and there is still an inspired lyrical poet beneath.

In our own uncertain times, Burns's sardonic wit is a tonic: “There is no such uncertainty as a sure thing,” he wrote. However much we try to plan for and shape the future, “The best laid schemes o' mice an' men/Gang aft a-gley./An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,/For promis'd joy!” In Burns's short, full, flawed life there was no time for whingeing: “I have always despised the whining yelp of complaint,” he wrote.

Last night's revelries, and the prospects of the coming year, may find you a little ramfeezled and forswunk - two of the finest Burns words, meaning exhausted, frazzled and befuddled.

Burns was no stranger to the morning after. “Amid the horrors penitence, regret, remorse, headache, nausea and all the rest of the hounds of hell that beset a poor wretch who has been guilty of the sin of drunkenness...My wife scolds me! My business torments me! And my sins come staring me in the face...”

Britain has been on massive borrowing binge and we have woken up feeling very much the worse for wear. Burns cannot solve our looming problems, but he can make us feel a little better about them, with his rude jokes, lust for life and faith in old friends to overcome bad times.

Burns provides a cup of kindness yet, the closest thing poetry can offer to hangover cure.

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