3 Review(s)

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.