Bard of Friendly Fire

Robert Crawford

Robert Burns: Poems edited by Don Paterson
The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg

It’s hard to call any poet a ‘bard’ now except as an ironic jab. Few poetic terms have shifted in significance so much. When, around 1500, William Dunbar called a rival Scottish poet an ‘Iersche brybour baird’, each word was a studied insult. ‘Iersche’ (Gaelic) was barbarous to Dunbar’s Lowland ear; a ‘brybour’ was a vagabond; a ‘baird’ was a limited sub-poet, not a ‘makar’.

Subscribers to the print edition can log in to view the entire article. For information about subscribing to the London Review of Books click here. This article is available for purchase online. Buy this article.

From the LRB letters page: [ 22 August 2002 ] David Miller [ 5 September 2002 ] Stephen Holt.

Robert Crawford, whose Selected Poems were published in 2005, teaches at St Andrews.