Selected Poems

Description

The first selection of Robert Louis Stevenson's poetry ever made, it makes available a neglected area of his writing. The author of Treasure Island and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is known all over the world as a master storyteller, yet his achievements as a poet have been strangely neglected. This book reveals how much we have been missing. Fascinated by a wide variety of verse techniques, Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) produced superb work in styles ranging from folk ballads to witty conversational offerings for his friends. Pieces using Robert Burns's stanza form and dialect rank among the most attractive Scots poetry of the nineteenth century. Angus Calder has brought together many uncollected poems, substantial extracts from the published collections and the complete Child's Garden of Verse (1885), an extraordinarily evocative picture of childhood loneliness, visions and fears. Far more than in his famous novels, it was here that Stevenson felt able to give direct expression to his deepest feelings about friendship, love and nostalgia; this definitive anthology captures a compelling and utterly individual voice.

Robert Louis Stevenson was born in Edinburgh in 1850. The son of a prosperous civil engineer, he was expected to follow the family profession but was finally allowed to study law at Edinburgh University. Stevenson reacted forcibly against the Presbyterianism of both his city's professional classes and his devout parents, but the influence of Calvinism on his childhood informed the fascination with evil that is so powerfully explored in Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Stevenson suffered from a severe respiratory disease from his twenties onwards, leading him to settle in the gentle climate of Samoa with his American wife, Fanny Osbourne.