Book description
Edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg. The Canongate Burns is
the most comprehensive and challenging edition of the poems and songs of
Robert Burns ever published. Drawing on extensive scholarship and the
poet's own inimitable letters, this definitive edition offers a wealth
of information on Burns's life and times, the hardship of his early
days, his political beliefs, his hatred of injustice and his fate as a
writer too often sentimentalised by biographers, critics and
well-meaning enthusiasts. The poems are presented in the order of their
first appearance, giving further insights into the reception of Burns's
work and the guarded relationship he had both with his readers and his
own fame. We see Burns as a radical figure in a British as well as a
Scottish context, the peer of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and
Byron in the revolutionary and repressive world of the 1790s. With its
inclusion of recently attributed poems, explanatory notes and extensive
Scots glosses, The Canongate Burns offers vitally fresh insights into
the irreverent spirit and the democratic convictions which illuminate
the work of Scotland's most famous poet. '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.' Colm Toibin, Independent 'A very fine
edition, and the long introduction, which sets out to clear the tangled
banks, is alone worth the cover price.' Andrew O'Hagan, Scotsman
'Scholarly and comprehensive.' Sunday Telegraph
