The Canongate Burns [Hardcover]

Robert Burns (Author), Andrew Noble (Editor), Patrick Scott Hogg (Editor)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 7, 2001 | Series: Canongate Classics

Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet's own inimitable letters, this edition, with extensive explanatory notes and a full Scots glossary for each of the poems, provides the most complete edition of Burns's work ever published. The poems and songs are also supplemented by a wealth of information on Burns's life and times. This controversial yet thorough reappraisal of the poet features over a dozen newly attributed poems and songs, which demonstrate that the poet's political sympathies were more radical than he could safely put his name to in public print. The Canongate Burns also includes the sexually scandalous versions known as "The Merry Muses," originally circulated only in handwritten copies.

Editorial Reviews

About the Author

Andrew Noble is the author of Artillery and Explosives, Researchers on Explosives, and Robert Louis Stevenson.

--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 1120 pages
• Publisher: Canongate U.S. (October 7, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 184195148X
• ISBN-13: 978-1841951485
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 5.6 x 3.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #3,824,678 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars An affordable, provocative edition, July 2, 2004

By 

Len von Morze (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns (Paperback)

This is an exciting edition which I, as a beginning reader of Burns, find myself picking up again and again. In offering the reader a radical Burns, rather than the folksy popular bard, editors Noble and Hogg bring clarity to the image of the poet, though I sometimes worry that it's a false clarity. Their desire to replace the porchiness of the old image with one of radical potency comes through in a sentence like this, describing Burns's challenge to the conservative pro-Hanoverian establishment: "They were faced with someone hyper-literate, fecundly allusive to a degree far beyond their powers in canonical literary and biblical tradition, who could not only talk their pants off but, it was feared, those of their wives and daughters as well" (lii). Burns thereby gets turned into a Jacobinic superhero who had the aristocracy secretly shaking in their boots. This seems like a bit of critical wish-fulfillment. Though hardly unknown, Burns did not have the celebrity that Scott would later have.

Perhaps just as problematic, their repeated aligning of Burns with Romantic poets like Wordsworth implies that Burns was a self-originating genius. While Noble and Hogg offer a magisterial indictment of Burns's posthumous de-politicization which anyone interested in the period should read, they spend far less time commenting on his much more obscure 18th-century sources. While they discuss the contemporary historical situation of Scotland well, they offer no information at all about dialect verse, a tradition which after all Burns did not invent in that country. Beneath it all seems to be an almost impossible desire to define Burns as a "national" poet while avoiding anything that might wall him into an "ethnic" tradition.

Despite these Romantic overtones, Noble and Hogg want to position Burns as part of the radical Enlightenment. And the editors' resuscitation of this legacy restores a sense of excitement not only to Burns, but also to the entire period. It's hard not to relish the combative tone with which they hold up Byron's Jacobinism for comparison, even though it seems facile and perhaps wrong: "Was the mine-owning self-dramatizing aristocrat ever under the cosh in the way Burns was? Is individual nihilism of the Byron, Baudelaire variety the necessary prelude to utopian change?" (xci) Their editorial strategies are also innovative; I appreciate the bold decision to append their interpretations after each poem, rather than in the traditional hard-to-reach, tiny-font footnote, or in the old headnote that meekly pretends to "frame" the ensuing poem. These discussions helped to clarify some of the difficult poems, as well as offering something to contend with. All in all, this is among my favorite editions of a major poet, even though I might question some of its methods.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Canongate has one "n" (see review below), December 15, 2005

By 

Annie27 (Florida) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Canongate Burns (Hardcover)

One of the reviewers below suggests the general level of critics of this book in apparently not knowing how to spell the name of the press.

The Canongate Burns has many typographical errors and should not be used as the only source one has of Burns's texts. It has, however, admirable notes outlining Burns's political writings of his last years. Several probable new works by Burns have been uncovered by the authors (and they are clearly labeled as works that appeared anonymously or under pseudonyms in newspapers).

In bringing Burns out of the shadows of "Holy Willie" self-righteousness and bardolatry, this edition is much to be commended. James Kinsley (The Oxford Standard authors) is to be preferred as your popular text of the poems, but if you want to know more and are truly interested in Burns and the political contexts in which he wrote, the Canongate Burns is an inimitable gloss on Burns as a person and on the ideas behind the poetry.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent work, July 15, 2003

By 

Diane Brzozowski "Diane B." (Montpelier, VT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Canongate Burns (Hardcover)

This is an excellent compilation of Burns' work, including many poems that were previously unpublished, unpublished in English language compilations or published under Burns' pseudonyms. The annotations, translations, and commentary are both helpful in understanding and interpreting this evocative and beautiful cornerstone of modern Scottish culture