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The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
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The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography

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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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateJun 8, 2021
ISBN9781400832842
The Bard: Robert Burns, A Biography
Author

Robert Crawford

Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature at St Andrews University. He received his MA from Glasgow University and his DPhil from Oxford. He is a founding Fellow of the English Association and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh. He has taught at the universities of Oxford and Glasgow, and has been at St Andrews since 1989.

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Rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I love the poems and songs of Robert Burns and have several of them by heart. Given the slightest encouragement, I'll recite for you in my best faux-Scots. I saw this on my library's New Books shelf and had to bring it home. I found it to be a punishingly scholarly look at Robert Burns. It's in chronological order, but has enough erudite explications and diversions that I lost the thread of Burns' life numerous times and had to go back several pages to re-orient myself. Exhaustive and exhausting, this book purports to be an accessible biography, but I found it ponderous and far more like a doctoral thesis than a narrative. To be fair, it does a wonderfully thorough job of placing Burns in his time and explaining much about the milieu in which he moved. There's just too much of it for the likes of me.

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The Bard - Robert Crawford

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