The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns
by Andrew Noble

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Book Reviews of The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns

Book Review: An affordable, provocative edition
Summary: 4 Stars

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.

Irish Books

• Books > Subjects > Biographies & Memoirs > Ethnic & National
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