The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography

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 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, 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.

Reviews of The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography

"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