The Oxford Edition of the Works of Robert Burns, Volume I:
Commonplace Books, Tour Journals, and Miscellaneous Prose
edited by nigel n. leask
oxford, 512 pages, $200
Robert Burns, “Rabbie” to those who love him, sired thirty-six children with eighteen mistresses before dying of exhaustion at age thirty-seven. Everyone who is Scottish claims him as a forebear despite the whiff of bastardy this introduces into the auld coat of arms. We have a Burns Day. We do not have a Yeats Day. He is a national poet in a way no other modern poet is.
His glory is his songs. For all the grandeur of the epic Tam o’ Shanter, the verse opera Jolly Beggars, and the major unscored lyrics, nothing equals the simple lyrics he set to the auld hieland airts. The art of writing song lyrics imposes a simple demand: no metrical substitution, which is the stock-in-trade of contemporary poetry. You must follow the template of the tune with every note, simple elisions excepted, bien sûr. Vocabulary must be simple so the verse can sing, though Lallans, Burns’s Lowland Scots, requires a dictionary for most people today.
When I was asked to do this review, I was sent the first volume in Oxford’s handsome new scholarly edition of Burns. It will no doubt be of great use to scholars, but it holds little interest for me. I was once given a second edition of Burns, four volumes published in 1801 which I scarcely dare open, its acidic paper and bindings are so fragile. A treasure. But my working copy is the Oxford Standard Authors. I see on its flyleaf that the price is six pounds, five pence. A fortune to a hungry college kid on the streets of Oxford more decades ago than I care to count.