Burns’ later poetry was produced in the intervals of farm and tax work. He wrote few additional satires, epistles, and dramatic monologues, as the famed Kilmarnock volume. His one important long poem after the Edinburgh period was Tam O’Shanter, but it was his greatest. It was written at the urging of captain Francis Grose (1731-1791), who wanted a witch story to accompany his engraving of Alloway Kirk in his Antiquities of Scotland (1791)
To such collections as James Johnson’s Museum, George Thonsson’s Select Collection of Original Scottish Airs (1793), and Peter Urbani’s Selection of Scots Songs Burns contributed more than 300 songs, including some of the finest lyrics in the language. In these lyrics, W.E. Henley writers, Burns “passed the folk-song of his nation through the mint of his mind, and he reproduced it stamped with his image and lettered with his superscription; so that for the world at large it exists, and will go on existing, not as he found it but as he left it.”
