This collection gathers the poetical works of Robert Burns (1759-1796), a farmer's son from Ayrshire whose poetry made him Scotland's national poet. Burns first reached a wide audience with the 1786 Kilmarnock edition, Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, and expanded it the following year in Edinburgh with additional poems and songs.
His work moves between three registers — broad Scots dialect, standard English, and a mixture of the two — often within the same poem. Recurring subjects include rural life and labor, animals observed with unusual sympathy ("To a Mouse," "To a Louse"), romantic and sexual love, class inequality and anticlerical satire, and Scottish identity. Narrative poems such as "Tam o' Shanter" sit alongside songs later set to music, including "Auld Lang Syne" and "A Red, Red Rose."
Burns wrote during the years leading up to and following the French Revolution, and sympathy for republican and egalitarian ideas surfaces throughout the collection, sometimes openly and sometimes in coded form. His use of vernacular Scots, at a time when English literary taste favored more formal diction, helped establish Scots as a literary language and shaped how later poets approached writing in regional voice.