Selected Poems of Robert Burns

“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men...” is just one of the many popular expressions that come from the poetry of Robert Burns, and “Auld Lang Syne,” sung all over the world on New Year’s Eve, is just one of the many well-known songs whose lyrics were written by Robert Burns.  Familiarly known as “Rabbie Burns,” he is generally titled “Scotland’s National Bard” and his influence among Scots is so strong—even now, more than two centuries after his death—that in 2009 he won a popular vote as the “The Greatest Scot” of all time (beating out William Wallace, hero of Mel Gibson’s 1995 film Braveheart).

Originally published in 1892, this selection of Burns’s poetry includes a biographical sketch of Burns by Nathan Haskell Dole, notes on most of the individual selections by the same, eleven illustrations (some from the original book, others added in 2022), and an extensive glossary of Scottish words to enable the modern English-language reader to understand the Scottish terms sprinkled throughout the verse.  Burns often wrote in Scots language but much of his poetry was in “light Scots dialect of English,” perfectly understandable to the English reader, especially with the help of the glossary; and he also wrote many poems and songs in standard English, especially if he was broaching political subjects or civil commentary.

Preparing old books for digital publication is a labor of love at Travelyn Publishing.  We hold our digital versions of public domain books up against any others with no fear of the comparison.  Our conversion work is meticulous, utilizing a process designed to eliminate errors, maximize reader enjoyment, and recreate as much as possible the atmosphere of the original book even as we are adding the navigation and formatting necessary for a good digital book.  While remaining faithful to a writer’s original words, and the spellings and usages of his era, we are not above correcting obvious mistakes.  If the printer became distracted after placing an ‘a’ at the end of a line and then placed another ‘a’ at the beginning of the next line (they used to do this stuff by hand you know!), what sort of mindless robots would allow that careless error to be preserved for all eternity in the digital version, too?  Not us.  That’s why we have the audacity to claim that our re-publications are often better than the originals.