The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence

The Complete Works of Robert Burns: Containing his Poems, Songs, and Correspondence. - With a New Life of the Poet, and Notices, Critical and Biographical by Allan Cunningham

[The first edition, printed at Kilmarnock, July, 1786, by John Wilson, bore on the title-page these simple words:Poems, chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns; the following motto, marked Anonymous, but evidently the poets own composition, was more ambitious: The following trifles are not the production of the Poet, who, with all the advantages of learned art, and perhaps amid the elegancies and idlenesses of upper life, looks down for a rural theme with an eye to Theocritus or Virgil. To the author of this, these, and other celebrated names their countrymen, are, at least in their original language, a fountain shut up, and a book sealed. Unacquainted with the necessary requisites for commencing poet by rule, he sings the sentiments and manners he felt and saw in himself and his rustic compeers around him in his and their native language. Though a rhymer from his earliest years, at least from the earliest impulse of the softer passions, it was not till very lately that the applause, perhaps the partiality, of friendship awakened his vanity so for as to make him think anything of his worth showing: and none of the following works were composed with a view to the press. To amuse himself with the little creations of his own fancy, amid the toil and fatigue of a laborious life; to transcribe the various feelingsthe loves, the griefs, the hopes, the fearsin his own breast; to find some kind of counterpoise to the struggles of a world, always an alien scene, a task uncouth to the poetical mindthese were his motives for courting the Muses, and in these he found poetry to be its own reward. Now that he appears in the public character of an author, he does it with fear and trembling. So dear is fame to the rhyming tribe, that even he, an obscure, nameless Bard, shrinks aghast at the thought of being branded asan impertinent blockhead,[lx] obtruding his nonsense on the world; and, because he can make a shift to jingle a few doggerel Scotch rhymes together, looking upon himself as a poet of no small consequence, forsooth! ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 18500
Author: Burns, Robert
Release Date: Jun 4, 2006
Format: eBook
Language: English

Contributors

Contributor (Author): Cunningham, Allan, 1784-1842