The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie (1762-1851)

This is a comprehensive selection of Joanna Baillie’s major lyric poetry. Her poetry ranged from songs and lyrical ballads to dramatic monologues and realistic blank verse poems relating to her youth in the Scottish countryside, as well as her life in London. Jennifer Breen places Baillie’s best poetry where it belongs – in the Romantic canon, demonstrably the equal of and the formative link between Robert Burns’ Scottish poetry and William Wordsworth’s meditations on Nature. This edition of Baillie’s work gives readers the opportunity to assess her significance and her craft. The introduction sets her lyric poems in in their Scottish context as well as linking her work with the Romantic period (1785-1832) generally.