| The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography. - Robert Crawford. |
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In this, the 250th anniversary year of his birth, how many people "the world o'er" will toast the immortal memory of the poet at Burns' Suppers? What made this 18th-century poet, who determinedly wrote his major poems in Scots, so loved and admired throughout the world and what makes him still so relevant to us today?
In The Bard, a major new biography of Burns for the 21st century, Robert Crawford, Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at the University of St Andrews, goes a long way towards helping our understanding of the phenomenon that was Robert Burns. Meticulously researched, this is no academic tome, but an accessible and readable account.
For someone who died at the early age of 37, Burns led a rich and full life. The farmer, the poet, the excise man, the lover, the radical and the celebrity are all delineated in these pages.
In this outstanding account, the author has given us a full-blooded, three-dimensional picture of Burns. He presents the poet in his "natural habitat" at work and at play, writing and courting and explains how a ploughman poet became the toast of Edinburgh, Scotland and ultimately the world.
Burns was wont to refer to himself as a "Will o' the wisp" and was a master of reinvention when it suited his purposes. He could sometimes be a manipulative and even selfish character, yet one who cared deeply about the lower orders in his society; a radical and egalitarian whose egalitarianism did not extend to his view and treatment of women.
Professor Crawford gives us an honest and unvarnished account of Burns' life, capturing each "shape shifting" turn. To aid the biographer, there is an astonishing amount of surviving documentation. The author has included an account, missed by other biographers, written by one of the last people to visit Burns before he died. This exhaustive research into the original sources has shed a fresh light on Burns the man as well as Burns the poet.
The man himself kept copies of letters he sent out. In his private correspondence and intensely personal "Common Place Books" self-doubt occasionally shows. Yet this "Heaven-taught ploughman" as Henry Mackenzie described him, was extremely well read and impressed all who met him with the quality of his conversation and with his personal charisma. He used his extensive networks to secure influential subscribers for the publication of his poetry.
Although not always likeable in his behaviour, Burns' genius and understanding of the universal human condition have ensured enduring world fame - his poems have never been out of print.
Unashamedly nationalist, Jacobite and radical in his sympathies at a time when a radical was a dangerous thing to be (especially for a government employee) Burns even feared imprisonment at one stage.
"The man of independent mind" would be a fitting epitaph, in the poet's own words, for a man the author describes as: "developing into the bard, not just of Scotland but of democracy itself". |
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