Book description
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 élan 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.
Robert Crawford was born in Lanarkshire in 1959. His first collection
of poems,
A Scottish Assembly
, was published in 1990. His
Selected Poems
(Cape, 2005) was awarded the Poetry Book Society's Special
Recommendation. Author of
Scotland's Books
(Penguin, 2007) and co-editor of
The Penguin Book of Scottish Verse
, Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the
University of St Andrews.
