Robert Louis Stevenson
Published: 2020-10-09
Total Pages: 68
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Songs of Travel and Other Verses was originally planned by Stevenson as an extension of Underwoods. In December 1894, shortly after the author's death, Sidney Colvin collected the lyric and occasional poems in Volume XIV of the Edinburgh Edition, incorporating them, in accordance with his friend's wishes, as Book III of Underwoods. Colvin maintained that Stevenson had left the naming of the work and the order of the poems to his literary executor's discretion. Rejecting such variants as Songs and Notes of Travel and Vailima, which the author had once considered, Colvin settled on the title Songs of Travel and Other Verses.An eighty-five-page, dark-blue, clothbound volume of Songs of Travel was published in its own right by Chatto & Windus in September 1896 (the first edition contained a list, dated July 1895, of books available from the publisher). In a prefatory note, Colvin, noting Stevenson's desire to treat the uncollected poems as Book III of Underwoods, declared that, "for the benefit of those who possess 'Underwoods' in its original form, it has been thought desirable to publish them separately in the present volume."The poems, which were composed from the time of Stevenson's sojourn at Saranac Lake to his final residence at Vailima, range from lyrical love poems to meditations on time, place, and mortality. A number of the poems consist of retrospective views of Stevenson's native Scotland, while others have a distinctly Samoan setting. The term "Travel" is used in a broader sense of not merely physical movement but also an interior pilgrimage, as in "The Vagabond" and "To the tune of Wandering Willie." British composer Ralph Vaughan Williams set nine of the poems to music in his 1904 song cycle, Songs of Travel.Includes a biography of the author.
