The Canongate Burns is the most comprehensive and challenging edition of the poems and songs of Robert Burns ever published. Drawing on extensive scholarship and the poet's own inimitable letters, this definitive edition offers a wealth of information on Burns's life and times, the hardship of his early days, his political beliefs, his hatred of injustice and his fate as a writer too often sentimentalised by biographers, critics and well-meaning enthusiasts.

The poems are presented in the order of their first appearance, giving further insights into the reception of Burns's work and the guarded relationship he had both with his readers and his own fame. We see Burns as a radical figure in a British as well as a Scottish context, the peer of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Keats and Byron in the revolutionary and repressive world of the 1790s.