Most of Anne Hunter's known poems are included in the present volume, and are taken from many different sources, both published and manuscript. Some poems have been excluded on grounds of quality and, where multiple copies exist, it is the earliest published (or in some cases more significant) version that has been included here.

Published poems

All of Anne's early published poems appeared anonymously in anthologies, books of music, or as broadsheets; they can be identified as hers because the texts are among her manuscripts. This is also true of her Nine canzonetts … and six airs for which she wrote both words and music. Three broadsheets, Donnel and Flora, Mary MacGie's dream and Sandy's Dream, although sometimes attributed to her, are in fact her musical settings of poems by others, and the same seems to be true of Bless'd be those sweetly shining eyes and Ah! could my sorrowful ditty.

Anne's best known poems, and the reason for her fame, are those set to music by Haydn during his first London visit in 1791 or 1792 and published in 1794 as VI Original Canzonettas, dedicated to Mrs John Hunter. Another poem of hers appeared in 1795 in his Second Sett of VI Original Canzonettas, dedicated to Lady Charlotte Bertie (a daughter of the Earl of Albermarle, not Lady Cholmondeley as frequently stated), and Anne is thought to have chosen the remainder. Two more of her lyrics, ‘O Tuneful Voice’ and The Spirit's Song’, appeared with music by Haydn several years later. John Peter Salomon also used some of her poems in his Six English Canzonets (?1802).

About 60 of Anne's poems were published in 1802 in Poems, and those included here are transcribed from the copy owned by the Royal College of Surgeons of England. A second edition appeared in 1803, and was followed in 1804 by a curious set of humorous poems, The Sports of the Genii. She wrote about 14 poems for George Thomson's Select Collection of Original Welsh Airs (1809–17) in which new words were fitted to new settings of traditional songs, commissioned from several leading composers including Haydn and Beethoven. Later poems appeared in Walter Scott's anthology, The English Minstrelsy (1810), and some of her best work, posthumously, in Joanna Baillie's anthology, A collection of poems, chiefly manuscript and from living authors (1823).