Robert Louis Steven- son: Selected Poems, ed. Angus Calder (Penguin, £7.99 in UK)

Stevenson wrote poems all his rather short life (1850-94), and in a number of styles and genres - ballad pieces, Scots dialect…

Stevenson wrote poems all his rather short life (1850-94), and in a number of styles and genres - ballad pieces, Scots dialect poems, nostalgic lyrics, epistolary verses to his friends. Some of them survive as anthology pieces, although they are generally misquoted (he wrote "home is the sailor, home from sea", not "home is the sailor, home from the sea"). Prose was his daily bread and his real vocation, yet Stevenson, though never a major poet, produced verse that lives on and he must certainly have had an influence on A.E.

Houseman and, I suspect, on Kipling too.