A major, brilliantly written new biography of poet Robert Burns, by a leading scholar of Scottish poetry
Robert Crawford's seventh collection of poems, Testament, was published by Cape in 2014. His first book was on T. S. Eliot, and his other prose books include The Modern Poet (2001) and an award-winning biography of Robert Burns, The Bard (Cape, 2009). He is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, a Fellow of the British Academy, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.
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*
Crawford has produced an act of homage as well as a fine
biogrpahy
*Sunday Times*
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