The Bard

Magnificent… This is a fine biography, and it is difficult to imagine its being surpassed for a very long time – Alexander McCall Smith * 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 *Crawford has produced an act of homage as well as a fine biogrpahy * Sunday Times *Lively, learned accounts of often misinterpreted lives – Boyd Tonkin * Independent *If you go into it knowing nothing of him you will emerge with understanding and admiration – Susan Hill * The Lady *Crawford is a sensitive chronicler of the poet and dogged debunker of the mythology that the legend of Burns has accreted over the centuries – Colin Waters * Sunday Herald *It is in the tonal analysis of Burns’s poems that Crawford is at his best in this outstanding book … it is beautifully produced, with an unpretentious elegance that Burns would have approved – John Carey * New York Review *

Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot- Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. 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. His poetry has been shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot Prize, and he has won two Scottish Arts Council Book Awards as well as the Saltire Scottish Book of the Year Award.

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