The Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry: Engaging New Audiences

This project seeks to engage new audiences for Walter Scott's poetry. It will do so by publishing five volumes of the Edinburgh Edition of Walter Scott's Poetry (EEWSP), by disseminating its findings to an academic audience, and by reengaging the general public with this body of work through educational and public events. In the early years of the nineteenth century Scott was the leading poet of the day. His long narrative poems, such as Marmion and The Lady of the Lake, sold in unprecedented numbers (The Lady of the Lake sold more than 25,000 copies in the first year) and they were translated into many languages and widely adapted (Rossini's la donna del lago provides the most enduring example).

Scott was at the heart of a network of Romantic writers and corresponded with Shelley, Byron, Goethe, John Clare and Wordsworth. Marmion is discussed in Jane Austen's Persuasion and in 1813 Scott was offered, but declined, the poet laureateship. Poems Such as The Lay of the Last Minstrel and The Lady of the Lake helped instigate Scottish tourism as visitors flocked to see the sites they describe. However, in spite of his poetry achieving unprecedented critical and popular success in the early years of the nineteenth centuty and the pivotal role it played in shaping both European Romanticism and Scottish cultural heritage it has been largely neglected for well over a hundred years. Scott is seldom included in
anthologies of Romantic verse, is largely written out of the narrative of British Romanticism, and, in spite of a critical reevaluation of his output more generally over the past thirty years, only a handful of studies engage with his poetic career. This is largely due to the lack of a reliable and supportive critical edition and indeed much of Scott's poetry is out of print. The editions that are in print rely on a flawed text provided by Scott's son-in-law J.G. Lockhart, which does not capture the artistic vision that Scott held for his poetry. Perhaps more significantly, they do not provide the support required for a modern reader to fully appreciate the astounding innovation that early readers and critics recognised in his poems.

The Edinburgh Edition will redress this lack. EEWSP will return to manuscripts and early editions to provide clean, reliable texts and will provide notes, glossaries and essays to fully support modern readers as they encounter these innovative poems. The project will raise the academic profile of Scott's poetry and the insights it gives to Romantic creativity by disseminating its findings at key international conferences and in scholarly papers.