Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

by Robert Burns, Andrew Noble, Patrick Scott Hogg

Overview

A complete volume of the writer's poetry and songs includes previously unpublished pieces, draws on extensive scholarship and Burn's own letters, and offers supplemental information about his life, early hardships, political beliefs, and literary contexts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781841953809
Publisher:	Canongate Books
Publication date:	01/01/2003
Series:	Canongate Classics Series , #24
Edition description:	Main
Pages:	1120
Product dimensions:	4.96(w) x 7.72(h) x 1.85(d)

About the Author

Robert Burns (1759 - 1796) was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide. Along with Walter Scott, he is probably the best known Scottish writer in the world. His life story is often represented as one of sexual and alcoholic excess. Perhaps less well known is the political turmoil of the time, and the physical hardships which he endured, which at one point led him to contemplate emigrating to Jamaica. It was the success of his published poetry that helped change his mind, and he went on to be lionised by Edinburgh society and the literary establishment, as much a misunderstood and sentimentalised "heaven-taught ploughman" as the Ettrick Shepherd. Like James Hogg, Burns wrote scathing satirical poetry such as Holy Willie's Prayer in which he scorned religious bigots and hypocrits.

Editorial Reviews

Scholarly and comprehensive.

Sunday Telegraph

A magnificent and definitive work of scholarship. A thousand pages long, it provides not only a glossary and a context for the poems, but also a textual and historical note for each poem and song.

The Independent - Colm Toibin

A very fine edition, and the long introduction, which sets out to clear the tangled banks, is alone worth the cover price.

The Scotsman - Andrew O'Hagan