The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography [Hardcover]

Robert Crawford (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: December 29, 2008

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.

Editorial Reviews

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

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 480 pages
• Publisher: Princeton University Press (December 29, 2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0691141711
• ISBN-13: 978-0691141718
• Product Dimensions: 9.5 x 6.5 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.7 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #245,780 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Getting to Know Burns.. hopefully a first cut, November 21, 2009

By 

Loves the View "Louise" (Hawaii) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (Hardcover)

Robert Crawford has put together a tremendous amount of material. He has arranged it chronologically putting the poetic pieces, some never published before, along in the time where they are presumed to be written. One of Burns' best loved poems is appropriately and beautifully out of sequence (as to writing, not publishing) at the end.

Like most Burns "fans" I loved a few poems, but knew little of his oeuvre. I somehow imagined the life force he seemed to live and celebrate. Now that I know more of Burns and his work, my appreciation of the poetry is stronger, but as to the life force it will take a while for it all to settle in.

His humble roots are never said to leave him, but Crawford shows how he must compromise and hold back to live among the royalists who control his job (a kind of tax collector) and "allow" him to publish his poems.

Early on he does public penance for the first of his affairs. Perhaps he decided it was not so bad, because sexual infidelity becomes a theme of his life. In it, he betrays not only people, but ideals; he idolizes the females who are raised to a life of leisure while getting servant and farm girls pregnant. Through much of his adult life there is someone pregnant by him whether he is married or not. There are probably women and offspring that history has not recorded.

Burns died at age 37, as much a victim of illness as the medical treatment of his time. His last dramatic, and somewhat redeeming act, could be construed as a statement of loyalty... or maybe a desire to die at home.

There is a lot here. Crawford presents it all in reportorial neutral prose, which is at times very stilted. Perhaps this is necessary, since it is one of the first modern biographies of Burns. I hope it is the first cut of the material, because the issues this book are worthly of more exploration. My problem with this book is that while the person is interesting, and the material very good, at times I was totally bored. I rarely do this, but the material was so dryly presented, I read the book over 6 weeks, with several books in the middle. For this reason I hold back a star and recommend this only for those with a deep interest in Burns.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Why Burns is still relevant, September 30, 2009

By 

Bruce P. Shields "Woodsman" (Eden, VT) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography (Hardcover)

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.

3.0 out of 5 stars a heavy read, December 8, 2011

By 

L. Kaplan "mackap" - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Paperback)

Though complete and not based on Burns myth, this book is a heavy read. Chronology is difficult to access and at times wading through the verbege loses the focus. Overall, though, a complete biography. Extremely interesting with respects to the political climate and Burns' own political views.