Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet's own inimitable letters, this edition offers a wealth of information on Burns's life, the hardships of his early days, his political beliefs, his hatred of injustice, and his fate as a writer too often sentimentalized by biographers and critics. Through his poetry, and as if for the first time, 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. Containing recently attributed and never-before-published poems demonstrating that the poet's political sympathies were more radical than he could safely put his name to in public, The Canongate Burns also includes the sexually scandalous verses known as The Merry Muses, originally circulated only in handwritten copies. This major and definitive edition offers vitally fresh insights into the irreverent spirit and the democratic convictions of Scotland's greatest poet.
- ISBN10 184195148X
- ISBN13 9781841951485
- Publish Date 28 November 2001 (first published 15 November 2001)
- Publish Status Cancelled
- Out of Print 5 February 2010
- Publish Country GB
- Imprint Canongate Books Ltd
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 1120
- Language English