SOURCE: Breen, Jennifer. “Introduction.” In The Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie, 1762-1851, edited by Jennifer Breen, pp. 1-25. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Breen presents an overview of Baillie's achievements in poetry, offering readings of a range of her work in order to show that she is a poet of high stature.

Joanna Baillie's Authorship and the Canon of Romantic Poetry

My Selected Poems of Joanna Baillie gives readers a modern edition of Baillie's poems with notes which explain historical and other allusions. I have included most of the poems in her first volume, Poems (1790),¹ which she published anonymously, and five of the six poems that she contributed to the anthology that she edited, A Collection of Poems (1823),² as well as a number of poems from her Fugitive Verses (1840),³ which she compiled after discovering that some of her earlier poems were being pirated in various...