The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9780691141718)

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.

Author: Robert Crawford
ISBN-10: 0691141711
ISBN-13: 9780691141718
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Language: English
Published: 01/18/2009
Pages: 480
Format: Hardcover
Weight: 1.75lbs
Size: 9.10h x 6.50w x 1.50d

Review Citation(s):
Booklist 01/01/2009 pg. 35
New Yorker (The) 02/09/2009 pg. 109
Chronicle of Higher Education 02/27/2009 pg. 18
Choice 06/01/2009
New York Review of Books 11/05/2009 pg. 47
Books & Culture 01/01/2010 pg. 36