The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography

by Robert Crawford

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 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. 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 élan 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 demonstrates why Scotland’s greatest poet still compels the attention of the world.

Genres: Biography, Poetry, Scotland, History, Nonfiction, Literature

352 pages, Hardcover

First published December 29, 2008

About the author

Robert Crawford FRSE FBA (b. 1959) is a Scottish poet, scholar and critic. He is emeritus Professor of English at the University of St Andrews.

Reviews

[Stuart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Heavy with Details on Rabbie's Life and Work
After doing a Burn's Night Celebration with my whisky club last year, including memorizing and performing a lesser-known poem of his called "A Lass with a Tocher", I felt like I needed to know more about the life of Scotland's National Bard. We even took a tour down to Ayrshire and saw Alloway Kirk and his cottage and the Burns Museum.

However, as an introduction this may not be the ideal book for beginners to Rabbie's life. As noted in other reviews, it's loaded with biographical details, endless references to different poems, friends, acquaintances, lovers, sponsors, and prominent people in his life, but the sheer amount of detail makes it read more like a dissertation than a biography.

So I had to just chip away at it over 4 months in little drips and drabs. I certainly learned a lot about this very complex, troubled, and yet often brilliant poet, full of passion, conflicted feelings about political equality and class, great national pride in Scotland's traditional songs and music, and a strong streak of manic depressive episodes.

In addition he was almost uncontrollably besotted by every woman he encountered, from sophisticated upper class women (who he courted heatedly with florid letters and poems) to maidservants (who he bedded as a substitute), and his long-suffering wife Jean Armour, who bore him 9 children, only three of whom survived to adulthood. He was frequently courting all these other women and professing his undying love while his wife was pregnant and stuck at home. He was devoted to supporting his family even to the point of accepting a job as an Exciseman of the British Crown, seeking illegal bothies and collecting taxes to feed him family.

The more you know of him, the more you realize just how complex and messy his life was, but as is often the case with artists and poets, much of this must have inspired his incredible range of work. And his lifelong work in collecting songs and setting his poetry to it in the Scots vernacular was an invaluable service in preserving Scottish oral culture for future generations.

He even dabbled in political egalitarianism, promoting Scottish heroes of independence like William Wallace and Robert the Bruce in order to disguise his support for democratic and republican movements for independence like the French and American Revolutions. This was quite dangerous to balance with his position as an Exciseman, but he was very clever in publicly voicing his support for the Crown while hiding various sentiments in poetry and comments to others.

In the end, this was well worth reading though it takes some concerted effort.

[J · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book can be a slog, but provides a great scholarly synthesis on Robert Burns. Like Melody noted below, this book reads like a doctoral dissertation, except for the many sexcapades and bawdy talk. While it is easy to get lost in asides, I enjoyed the overwhelming context that Crawford provided. I think Burns is remarkable in that he was part poet and part ethnographer -- chronicling the traditional songs of Scotland. His immediate appeal in Scotland stems from his use of these traditional verses. Yet, his lasting contribution came by masterfully employing those songs and rhythms to explore his own ideas.

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Burns was a lowland Scots farmer and a man of great passion and intellect. In person he was a charming conversationalist, drinking companion, and lover. He was also a natural rhymer putting into verse addresses (as the subtitle of his works published in his life proclaimed, “Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect”) to his friends and foes (religious and political), his girlfriends (of which he a great many), food, drink, sheep, mice, and lice. In one early poem he even turns his tax bill into verse. Somewhat ironically, at the end of his life he worked as an exciseman himself collecting taxes for the British government to supplement his agricultural income. A strong proponent of equality, he strongly believed in the virtues of the common man, praising both American and French Revolutions, while at the same time, economic necessity constrained him to additionally both praise and flatter his wealthy and aristocratic patrons.

In Crawford’s account he was deeply influenced by the folklore and folk songs of his native Ayrshire and came to use their form for the great majority of his poetry. The author also details the ups and downs of his life: his deep depressions and emotional highs, his sudden fame that came just before he was about to flee Scotland for a plantation in Jamaica to escape poverty and a paternity suit. Crawford explains why the status of Scotland’s national bard is one that continues to this day. The biography is also a great help in understanding the apparent contradictory sentiments in Burns’s political poems such as “Robert Bruce’s March to Bannockburn” and “Ye Jacobites by Name.” Crawford points out the economic and political strain that Burns put himself in by saying one thing to his close friends, and another to his patrons.

[Melody · Rating 2 out of 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.

[Steven Shook · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is likely to be the most comprehensive biography concerning the life of Robert Burns. The writing is dense and presented in timeline format. Crawford has drawn from letters written to and from Burns that results in putting much more context, or meat, to the story of Robert Burns' life relative to similar biographies.

I'm not a native of Scotland or Europe, so at times I became confused about certain locations being discussed in the book. Hence, it would have been helpful to have included some maps of Scotland to orient the reader, especially since specific locations seem to have had an important impact on Burns' life.

[Ethel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This biography is amazing. It nevers gets too dry or boring and it is not scared to show the real nature of Robert Burns. That is, it is not scared of demystifying his figure and show his good and bad aspects. I have learned a lot with this book and, specifically talking about Burns, I do think it is essential to be aware of the things that happened in his life so that one can understand his poems —which often have autobiographical elements— better.

[Bradley William Holder · Rating 4 out of 5]

O Robert! Dear Burns Bobby!
Rab the Ranter, Mossgiel Robby.
(Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.)
Well met, my bro! Well, sorta.

To really understand an artist—their motivations, their process, their limitations—you need to dig into their life a little more deeply (i.e., invasively) than your average reader of—yes, even “classic”—literature is typically willing to do. For most of my writing life, however lackadaisically executed, I’ve believed that the intentions of the writer, as regards (e.g.) meaning, are neither more nor less important than the expectations of the reader. In other words, reading—like any other experience—is, through and through, a top-down process; and the preconceptions that the reader brings to the work are just as valid (if not more so) than whatever shaky claims the work has to an objective interpretation. That said, reading through Burns’s Collected Works (review forthcoming) has been, for me, more than just a little bit mystifying since, for Burns, poetry was not just how he permanently latched himself onto both a language and a country’s literary tradition but also how he communicated (viz. privately) with his many friends and lovers—and I mean many lovers—over the course of a brief yet not uneventful lifetime. What this means is that many of Burns’s poems, like the email inbox of your company’s HR representative, were never meant to be published. Of course, this doesn’t mean that they, quite unlike those of the aforementioned white-collar busybody, aren’t exceptionally publishable.

This makes me think about all the famous people whose personal correspondences, and consequently very private lives, have—and very much without their consent—entered the public domain since their deaths. (From what his own letters tell us, this doesn’t apply to Robert Burns in the slightest. He would’ve loved this kind of attention. But.) What about Franz Kafka? What about Vincent van Gogh?—both of whose letters are still greedily consumed by millions of people today (myself included). And for what? Financial gain? I once attended a talk in graduate school where the speaker made the argument that it is the responsibility of the living to keep the dead “alive”—effectively through the act of celebration. (She may have cited ancestor worship—no doubt, a primitive template for the modern theological model of worshipping all-powerful, supernatural “proxy parents”—as an example, but I don’t remember.) I was too nervous at the time, but during the Q&A I wanted to ask her what made her so sure that even the best of us—that is, those that, more than anyone, ought to be celebrated and commemorated for what they’ve used their limited time on earth to do—wanted to be remembered. Sure, it seems almost commonplace that your grandmother would want you to pass on her memory to your own grandchildren—that an internet celebrity, assuming their fame lasts more than fifteen minutes, would want to persist through the adoration of their fanbase. But there is undeniably, at least in my mind, a sort of calm that comes with accepting the kind of dust-in-the-wind meaninglessness that allowing oneself to fade into everlasting oblivion (which is what’s going to happen to all of us anyway) both requires and represents. The only satisfying counterpoint that comes to mind—but not without further complicating things, of course—is that the expired lives and yet-to-be-determined legacies of those people that we, whether as individuals or as a culture, deem important belong ultimately to us and not to their own selves. Simply put, the dead are the property of the living.

Writing a biography—ostensibly an entertainment piece (and scholarly work, too, I suppose) assembled as much for public consumption as for personal profit—is, if we allow ourselves to follow this train of thought further, essentially grave robbery, identity appropriation, historical plagiarism. (I’m exaggerating—but only slightly.) One reason why this biography in particular is such a devastating example of this exact phenomenon is that it tells its story—that is, the story of Robert Burns’s life and work—using primary sources written by the man himself, namely (1) letters, (2) poems, and (3) journals. To Crawford’s credit—and unlike, according to him, many of his predecessors—the rare times during this thorough and, I’ll be honest, lovingly constructed tome during which he is forced to speculate based on insufficient evidence he openly admits to it. Pouring over half-destroyed billet-doux and analyzing the personal notebooks and various incarnations of published and republished poems of such an, at times, slippery and contradictory historical figure must have been a tremendous labor of love—a tremendously toilsome one. Despite the obvious work involved, The Bard never feels stale or aimless. I’m tempted to chalk that up to Burns himself (it was his life after all); but credit to where credit is due (it stopped being his a long time ago).

For better or for worse, I’ve lately found myself relating to Robert Burns quite a lot—though by no means is there a perfect resemblance between us. (Thank God for that.) Burns was impulsive, overly emotional, hardworking, bibulous, clumsily passionate, highly salacious, and fickle. By my count, he had five children out of wedlock, with various women, most of them while he was married to a perpetually pregnant Jean Armour. He had a chronic case of imposter’s syndrome (i.e., he never went to college but was, from an early age, always reading)—worse, by my assessment, than most PhD students. (This was the result of a less-than-flattering class consciousness.) He was obsessed with fame, was often concerned about money, loved his country, and had something of a rebel’s spirit. He’s one of those rare poets—with whom I include other bathologically-inclined writers like Dante and Wordsworth—who sought, in the kind of gesture that, as a proper literary device, wouldn’t really gain mainstream acceptance until the fall of the Berlin Wall in the twentieth century, the artistic assimilation of the quotidian with the highfalutin. He was charming, gregarious, and prone to depressive episodes. He was a constant letter-writer and a lifelong freemason.

There is a lot about Robert Burns that is problematic, especially vis-à-vis his treatment of women and his understanding of his rôle as a father and a husband. (I think that one reason why he is considered an early Romantic is because his lifestyle, not just his work, had such an impact on Lord Byron et alia.) Admittedly, The Bard, likely because Burns had no reason to send letters to the people with whom he lived, is oddly silent on exactly how the poet regarded his wife and children. This is one of those things we just can’t know. But his silence, as well as what we know about his numerous extramarital affairs—to me anyway—would indicate that, despite the fact that he was, especially near the end of his life, often anxious about not being able to provide for his family, he still wasn’t the most attentive head of household. Nevertheless, I see a lot of myself in him (or I see a lot of him in myself)—some things to be proud of, some things to stop doing, some things to avoid. My previous misgivings aside, undertaking to read a biography is not solely an indulgent practice—one doesn’t, in other words, leave dissatisfied if they don’t leave with the thing they expected to get. Learning that a few centuries ago, someone like you, notwithstanding a myriad of societal and technological differences, was basically going through the same shit, or at least something similar, might be one of its potential benefits.

There are plenty of practical reasons, not just sentimental ones, for preventing a person’s memory from dying alongside them. While I am, for some mysterious reason, sensitive to those of us who may wish their legacy (or lack thereof) to be respected with the gift of silence, it is likely the more healthy—because utilitarian—alternative to look at the assemblage of personal, family, and cultural histories as, much more than either locker-room gossip or a few overpriced hours on a chaise longue, a way of contextualizing the behavior and beliefs of our heroes and of ourselves, often with one another. The dead are the property of the living—but only insofar as the members of society are, perhaps paradoxically, united by a desire to uncover and preserve a truth that is meaningful as much to the whole as it is to the individual. A few months ago, I decided to read a biography about Robert Burns—the first biography I’ve read since grade school, by the way—because I wanted to understand the man’s poetry better. Poets write to be understood, but no artist—genius or poetaster—is wholly equivalent to the act of creation, to the artistic artifact they’ve created. To the extent that Burns’s life, like the lives of so many others, no longer belongs to him, he has ceased to be dead. Does that make us, too, a little less alive? Well, sorta.

[Mark Bruce · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s not so easy to keep a reader interested in the life of a poet. It’s even less easy to capture, in the events of a poet’s life, the essence of his heart and soul.
Yet Gregory forges on, giving an exhaustive account of the women Burns bedded, the parties at which he got drunk, the people he pissed off and the ones he palled around with.
Gregory likes to bring in other poets to contrast them with Burns, something which becomes tedious. I could have enjoyed more passages from the Bard himself rather than second rate dialect poetry.
The Robert Burns which emerges from this book is fickle, petty, worried about keeping both his job and his street cred, and a drunkard. Yet the author also notes Burns’ rough and draining work as an excise man, his love for his wife Jean, his prodigious output of poems and songs.
I suppose at 250 years’ distance, it’s not easy to catch the essence of a man, particularly from an age like the 18th century, where the language of his reporters masked so much.
And I will say that the book has helped me ken more of Burns poetry. So I give it a recommendation.

[Brad · Rating 2 out of 5]

This book was a slow read for me. Most of the text in the book is not as much a narrative of Burnss' life as an analysis of his influences, poetry, feelings, and political views. I enjoy Burns's poetry and read this book before a scheduled trip to the Writer's Museum in Edinburgh.

Burns is a hard figure to sympathize with. He slept around, got many girls pregnant, lied to women about this relationships with other women, cheated on his wife, spent a good deal of his time drunk, and got an excise officer fired so he could have his job.

I did enjoy the parts of the book that intersected with world history, like the effect of the American and French Revolutions on Scotland. Burns himself was a Jacobite and sympathetic to both American and French revolutionary views. These sympathies worried him later and life and he lived a dual life of private republican views while publicly working for the British government and proclaiming his loyalty to the crown.

[Ann · Rating 4 out of 5]

Crawford's biography of Robert Burns connects the Bard's life and personality with his songs and poetry. In doing so, Crawfors makes the Bard and his poetry come to life. Crawford discusses the informal and formal influences on Burns development as a poet. I found the book a great read but very intenese and a bit dense.

The book contains an Acknowledgements section; a Reading Burn's Poems section; an Introduction; seven, lengthy chapters; a list of Abbreviations; a Notes section; and an Index. The book is full of quotes from letters and of course, the poems.

I highly recommend the book for those interested in Burns, the period of history, the history of literature, a sense of all things Scottish, and to gain insights into poets of note and how poets/poetry develop.

[Brian Willis · Rating 4 out of 5]

While the definitive Burns biography is yet to be written, this is the best available "popular" biography, as in not overtly academic in scope. It's well done, accessible, covers the basics, explicates the key verses well, and doesn't engage too much in tabloid gossip, though Burns's life lends itself to that. I tried Mackay's bio, purchased at the Edinburgh Writer's Museum, but it read far too academically, although it appears he broke new ground with uncovering new personal ties and relationships and even illegitimate children, but was later criticized for academic practices. This hits the right spot. 400 pages almost to the tee, right to the point, passionately Scottish. Recommended.

[MH · Rating 3 out of 5]

A massive, thoroughly researched biography of Burns, who had enough fame while he was alive, and wrote and received enough letters, that Crawford can trace almost all of the poet's movements - which he does. Crawford's a friendly writer as well as being a painstaking reasearcher, and the last third of the book is really compelling as he shows how Burns' many sides (an ambitious man flattering the great and good, while at the same time writing powerful egalitarian poetry; a womanizer - 'rake' is far too gentle - impregnating women left and right, and bragging to friends about his prowess, while swearing absolute fidelity and creating devoted love poetry) were lived and performed. It was slow going to get there, though, although admittedly that might be because I'm just a casual admirer of Burns' work - for readers with a deeper interest in the poet or the social world of 18th century Scotland, Crawford's detailed history could be deeply rewarding.

[Emory Grace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not usually a non-fiction reader, but I read this in anticipation of delivering the Immortal Memory at a Burns' Night this year, and I was genuinely getting teary by the end. Crawford does a lovely job of introducing Burns as a dear friend, tracking his life with thorough but not overwhelming detail, infusing his letters and poetry, both iconic and less known, to paint a beautiful picture of Robert Burns the man. I checked out a copy from the library, but I'll be buying my own soon.

[Diana · Rating 3 out of 5]

The second half was definitely better than the first half, which I found tedious and disjointed. That said, the thorough background on Burns’s influences taken from personal letters and other sources was fascinating and informative.

[Louise · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Crawford has put together a tremendous amount of material. He has arranged it chronologically putting the poetic pieces, some never published before, along in the time where they are presumed to be written. One of Burns' best loved poems is appropriately and beautifully out of sequence (as to writing, not publishing) at the end.

Like most Burns "fans" I loved a few poems, but knew little of his oeuvre. I somehow imagined the life force he seemed to live and celebrate. Now that I know more of Burns and his work, my appreciation of the poetry is stronger, but as to the life force it will take a while for it all to settle in.

His humble roots are never said to leave him, but Crawford shows how he must compromise and hold back to live among the royalists who control his job (a kind of tax collector) and "allow" him to publish his poems.

Early on he does public penance for the first of his affairs. Perhaps he decided it was not so bad, because sexual infidelity becomes a theme of his life. In it, he betrays not only people, but ideals; he idolizes the females who are raised to a life of leisure while getting servant and farm girls pregnant. Through much of his adult life there is someone pregnant by him whether he is married or not. There are probably women and offspring that history has not recorded.

Burns died at age 37, as much a victim of illness as the medical treatment of his time. His last dramatic, and somewhat redeeming act, could be construed as a statement of loyalty... or maybe a desire to die at home.

There is a lot here. Crawford presents it all in reportorial neutral prose, which is at times very stilted. Perhaps this is necessary, since it is one of the first modern biographies of Burns. I hope it is the first cut of the material, because the issues this book are worthy of more exploration. My problem with this book is that while the person is interesting, and the material very good, at times I was totally bored. I rarely do this, but the material was so dryly presented, I read the book over 6 weeks, with several books in the middle. For this reason I hold back a star and recommend this only for those with a deep interest in Burns.

[Aaron Belz · Rating 3 out of 5]

Here is the review I published about this book:
http://www.booksandculture.com/articl...

I thought it was a thoroughgoing and unsparing look at the life of a poet whose mythic status needs to be corrected by an understanding of his personality disorders and sexual addictions.

[Amylu · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is studious. It gave me a deep look at Burns but I think I picked it up at a time when I was more interested in something cursory and surface skimming which you can scan the whole of him with this comprehensive edition. It is very thorough.

[Dayla · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is awarded (by me) to the author, the Best Biographer, whose writing is so clearly phrased, and who understands the character so deeply that one finishes the book and realizes that prejudices held for over 30 years have simply been washed away.

Highly recommend!!!!!!

[Peter · Rating 4 out of 5]

A good account of Burns' life and psychology, aimed at the international reader rather than the Scot and/or the Burns enthusiast.

[Frederick]

Writing is dense, begins with profiles of the people who influenced Burns growing up.

[Sara · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great book with tons of Burns scholarship. Great read if interested in Scotland's finest poet.

[Terje Fokstuen · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's a smart, and thorough look at Burns' life. His writings are analyzed as they bear on his life. Not an easy read but if you like or love Burns, well worth the effort.

[Douglas · Rating 5 out of 5]

A superb literary biography of the first order concisely documenting the man and his work.