Selected Poems

Robert Henryson (?-1508) is the greatest of the English fabulists. His master may have been Aesop, but the voice that speaks the Moral Fables is distinctively that of his place — Scotland — and his chosen tradition. His debt to Chaucer, from whom his best-known work, the 'Testament of Cresseid' clearly derives, is a large one, and he acknowledges it generously. But it is a positive debt, not the kind that might have stifled his native originality. He is as distinctively himself as his contemporaries Dunbar and Douglas are. Little is known of Henryson's life but much can be surmised about his human vision from the poems, particularly the Moral Fables. He is the most approachable and benign of the Scottish poets of his time. In this selection of the best of Henryson's work W.R.J. Barron, Senior Lecturer in English Language at the University of Manchester, includes a full introduction and notes.