The Narrative Poems

Walter Scott’s poetry has received little critical attention in recent years and there is as yet no modern scholarly edition. Seldom included even in anthologies of Romantic poetry, his poems have been all but written out of critical constructions of Romanticism.¹ This belies their phenomenal popularity at the time of their publication and their influence throughout the nineteenth century (and, through Victorian intermediaries, their continuing presence in twentieth-and twenty-first-century poetry). The de facto critical consensus overlooks Scott’s innovative treatment of the relationship of poetry to the past and to both personal and national identity