Presentation
Rediscovering Helen Craik's Lost Poems: looking at (and looking beyond) the Burns connection
Sixth World Congress for Scottish Literatures
(2024)
Abstract
a talk for a conference session: This paper will briefly report on Craik’s 1790 manuscript notebook, Poems by a Lady; in the Beinecke Library, Yale, a fair copy of her collected poetry written at the request of Burns’s neighbour and patron Robert Riddell, look at the range of poetry it includes, especially in her satires and verse-letters to friends; show how the dating of the poems counteracts or at least modifies earlier biographical accounts, and suggests that its close match in binding and orthography with the Burns Glenriddell Manuscript (1790-1792) may indicate that Craik’s collection provided the model for Burns’s, and more tentatively that her Gothic narrative poems had a role in him writing his own ghost tale of Allway Kirk, not in prose, but as as deciding to write his ghost tale about Alloway Kirk, not in prose, but as his only extended verse narrative.
Keywords
- Helen Craik,
- Scottish poetry,
- Scottish Gothic,
- Robert Burns,
- Tam
Disciplines
Publication Date
July 4, 2024
Location
University of Nottingham
Citation Information
Patrick Scott. "Rediscovering Helen Craik's Lost Poems: looking at (and looking beyond) the Burns connection" Sixth World Congress for Scottish Literatures (2024) Available at: http://works.bepress.com/patrick_scott/451/