Overview

A major, brilliantly written new biography of poet Robert Burns, by a leading scholar of Scottish poetry. No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of the great poet. With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible elan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive, intelligent biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compels the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

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9781844139309

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Magnificent... This is a fine biography, and it is difficult to imagine its being surpassed for a very long time. Daily Telegraph Crawford has delivered a living Burns: smart, arrogant, chivalrous, but also a strong poet to be confronted at every step of our written and sung culture. After this, we can't just take Burns down from the shelf this one night a year. Observer Robert Crawford gives us a sympathetic portrait of a self-fashioning Burns who has to imagine himself as a bard - a poet not only in word but in act - in order to become one. Crawford's Burns, merrily mixing high and low culture, seems eerily contemporary. New Yorker Generous, highly intelligent and comprehensive biography...a portrait that comes nearer to the whole man than any other yet written...I can't imagine a better life of the Bard being written. It is likely to become the standard work: certainly it deserves to be greeted as that. Literary Review

Magnificent... This is a fine biography, and it is difficult to imagine its being surpassed for a very long time. Daily Telegraph Crawford has delivered a living Burns: smart, arrogant, chivalrous, but also a strong poet to be confronted at every step of our written and sung culture. After this, we can't just take Burns down from the shelf this one night a year. -- Brian Morton Observer Robert Crawford gives us a sympathetic portrait of a self-fashioning Burns who has to imagine himself as a bard - a poet not only in word but in act - in order to become one. Crawford's Burns, merrily mixing high and low culture, seems eerily contemporary. New Yorker Generous, highly intelligent and comprehensive biography...a portrait that comes nearer to the whole man than any other yet written...I can't imagine a better life of the Bard being written. It is likely to become the standard work: certainly it deserves to be greeted as that. Literary Review Lively, learned accounts of often misinterpreted lives -- Boyd Tonkin Independent

Author Information

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including Young Eliot. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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