Scottish Poems

In time for Burns Night (the annual celebration of Scottish culture that takes place on January 25, the birthday of Robert Burns)—a sweeping literary tour of Scotland from the Middle Ages to the present, the only single-volume collection of Scottish poetry currently available.

Scottish poetry has a long and distinguished history in three languages—English, Scots, and Gaelic—and all are well represented here. The most renowned and beloved poets—Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Robert Louis Stevenson, Hugh MacDiarmid, and Muriel Spark among them—mingle with their lesser-known but equally distinctive compatriots, including many of those who have emerged from the recent Scottish poetry renaissance. The poems are organized by theme: from matters of the heart to subjects spiritual and philosophical to the poetry of place. All of the verse is marked by a characteristic energy, wit, satire, and passionate lyrical intensity, and all demonstrates the power of art that proudly emanates from, but is never limited by, the place of its birth.

Gerard Carruthers is the editor of the Everyman’s Library Pocket Poets anthology Robert Burns.