By Andrew Harrow

PREVIOUSLY unseen songs, letters and prose by Robert Burns will form the heart of a new collection which will cast new light on the Bard's genius.

The Sunday Herald can reveal that the University of Glasgow and Oxford University Press (OUP) are collaborating to produce the most comprehensive collection of Burns's work ever compiled.

In what will be a 10 to 15-year project, the Bard's work is being re-edited from scratch by prominent academics. The work will begin next year and will coincide with celebrations marking the 250th anniversary of Burns's birth.

Dr Gerard Carruthers, director of the Centre for Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, said the project will "cast a new light on Burns", and added that Glasgow was an opportune place to begin such a venture.

He said: "We have an outstanding group of scholars at Glasgow who have both the academic credentials required for such an edition, and the imagination and passion for Burns to produce something truly spectacular."

While the centre will be at the forefront of the re-editing, it will also have the support of prominent professors from the US and England, in what Carruthers said is "a genuinely world-class project".

Carruthers also believes The Collected Works Of Robert Burns is evidence that the Bard is being reassessed as a prominent literary figure after a number of years in the academic wilderness.

He said: "There was a long-standing snobbery towards Burns's work but I think this new collection, and Oxford's involvement in it, highlights that he is, once again, being regarded as a world-class poet and a man who was at the forefront of the romantic movement."

Although the 10-volume collection will initially be a purely academic publication, it is expected that many of the more accessible pieces will eventually be made available to the public.

"The songs have never properly been presented, so we intend to set up a large web resource to showcase them," said Carruthers. "The volumes will originally be available in libraries, but eventually everything will be online."

The work will replace the existing edition of poems and songs published by Oxford in 1968. OUP literature editor Andrew McNeillie believes the new collection "will establish Burns for the 21st century and illuminate corners of his life and work, and their afterlives, never brought to light before".

He added: "I look forward to nothing more than having it on my shelf."

It is also thought the collection will help expand Burns's international appeal.

Professor Murray Pittock, a co-editor on the project, said: "Scotland perhaps has not taken Burns to the world as much as we should have, but this new collection should help to change that."

The project will be officially launched in January at the centre's four-day international conference on Burns.