Happy Birthday, Burns

Can't let the 25th January go by without remembering Burns. Carol McGuirk's Selected Poems is the best critical edition of his writing. For me, her unfussy, intelligent notes add the necessary context but don't go overboard and her obvious enthusiasm for Burns brings life to his writing better than any other scholar.

'Burns's power as an artist resides in his demotic yet idealizing poetic language: "the only example in history", said Emerson, "of a language made classic through the genius of a single man." [...] With an entirely deceptive simplicity, he tells us who we are, by what we feel.' [Preface, p. xviii]

The blip is of Alexander Reid's portrait which is on the front cover of the Penguin Classics edition [1993].