Product Description

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns's energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he 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 number of untapped sources--from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries--this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet.

Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and molded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the major Romantics. 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 biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #279592 in Books
• Published on: 2008-12-29
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Dimensions: 1.40" h x 6.50" w x 9.50" l, 1.78 pounds
• Binding: Hardcover
• 480 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780691141718
• Condition: NEW
• Notes: Brand New from Publisher. No Remainder Mark.
• Click here to view our Condition Guide and Shipping Prices

From The New Yorker
Robert Burns died an exciseman (tracking down smugglers in the port of Dumfries), but he lived, loved, and versified as an outlaw. Incapable of keeping his �guid weely-willy p�le� in his pants, he produced an impressive number of bastards, as well as several legitimate children. He was a flash dresser, a smooth talker, and a political radical. Robert Crawford, following in the demystifying path of Catherine Carswell�s 1930 biography (for which she received a bullet in the mail, along with a note imploring her to shoot herself), 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. He shares with great hip-hop artists a genius for catchy, sexy, and memorable rhymes gloriously liberated from the hegemony of standard English.
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From Booklist
*Starred Review* The first twenty-first-century biography of Scotland’s national poet publishes on January 25, 2009, the two-hundred-fiftieth anniversary of his birth, and it is an exceptional book. Crawford draws on sources discovered since the last two lives in the 1990s and on others never previously exploited, such as the love letters between Burns and Agnes McLehose, who was too much Burns’ social superior to get physical with him (the peasant Burns flirted with the likes of Jamaican planter’s wife McLehose but bedded servant and other working girls). Furthermore, Crawford has excluded all the legends accruing to Burns over the centuries, basing this book on Burns’ own writings, on what those who knew Burns and his family wrote or reported, and on legal and other documents. Only those who don’t know Burns at all (and did you know the rebellious political implications of “Auld Lang Syne”? Read Crawford’s last chapter) will think Crawford’s strategy is a recipe for a dull book. More brilliantly than any other literary figure, perhaps, Burns was the man and artist of the common people. He strides forth from Crawford’s packed, analytically intense prose as at once a cultural colossus and a poignantly, sympathetically flawed and battered man: a hero. --Ray Olson

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. 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

Customer Reviews

Why Burns is still relevant
Burns has in the past 50 years come to be treated as a precious relic, to be adored, worshipped, referred to, but not much read. Part of what stoked his rise to fame was his insistence upon writing at least a part of his work in his native Ayrshire dialect. But his broader fame came at first from his English poems, through which he achieved a broader audience. Though he affected being a "farmer poet," his ambition went far beyond that genre. Crawford examines an incredible mass of documentary evidence, most of which was nearly inaccessible up to about 50 years ago, and was too voluminous to sort through until the advent of digital technology. The result is a very solid biography which may resolve some old questions about Burns's character, and which shows how strong Burns's influence upon Scottish and English literature, music, and song has been. I can't imagine anyone in the future writing an essay on Burns without having read this work.