Burns: A Study of the Poems and Songs

by Thomas Crawford

"This Brilliant Book is probably the best critical study of Robert Burns' poetical works as such that has yet been written. No previous critic of Burns' poetry has made such full use of modern critical methods, nor so fully done justice to the subtlety with which Burns exploited the possibilities of all the various kinds of Scots and English (especially as spoken in Scotland) that were actually available to him. The author is less interested in the sources of Burns' poems and songs than in the use, often novel, that Burns made of them; and though he acknowledges how much Burns owed to past Scots and English Literary tradition, his detailed and lucid analysis of the stages by which Burns became a poet not only of local but of national and even universal significance effectively exposes the inherent limitations of the view (first formulated by Angellier in 1893, and still widely taken for granted) that Burns was essentially "the culminating point of a native literature which now seems at an end." The text is fully documented; and for those unacquainted with Scots the author has provided a detailed appendix on the phonetics of Burns Scots and Scots-English, and a glossary containing about 1000 entries."

400 pages, Hardcover

Published June 1, 1960