Warlock Rhymer: An English Translation of Robert Burns’ Scots Poems

Robert Burns is called the world’s foremost poet of love; yet in of all of his poems written in Scots, there is but one which can be described as a romantic verse to or about a woman. All of his love lyrics were songs, composed to preexisting melodies. He composed verse in both Scots and English, but his great poetry is in Scots; not the Gaelic of the Highlands, but Lallans (lowlands), broad Scots. Andrew Calhoun has translated these poems into a Burns-era, Scottish-flavored English and collected them together for the first time as a near complete set of Burns’ Scots poems. These poems, accessible to any educated reader of English, provide a window on his life and thought. Many were written as verse letters to friends. With his prose Letter to John Moore, included in Warlock Rhymer, they comprise something of an autobiography.