Vol. 24 No. 14 · 25 July 2002
pages 16-18 | 4553 words
Bard of Friendly Fire
Robert Crawford
- Robert Burns: Poems edited by Don Paterson
Faber, 96 pp, £4.99, February 2001, ISBN 0 571 20740 5
- The Canongate Burns: The Complete Poems and Songs of Robert Burns edited by Andrew Noble and Patrick Scott Hogg
Canongate, 1017 pp, £40.00, November 2001, ISBN 0 86241 994 8
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’.
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Letters
Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002
From David Miller
Robert Crawford's version of Robert Burns's 'radicalism' (LRB, 25 July) seems to amount to a 'sentimental' Scottish cultural populism that was 'republican' but also inclined towards 'Jacobitism'. This tells more about the political content of Scottish cultural nationalism as it is today than it does about Burns's poetry (a close analysis of which might have been helpful). The anti-Modernist, sentimental, blood-and-soil cultural smugness of recent versions of Burns ought to be recognised for what it is: reactionary. Crawford's version of 'they the people' reminds me of Adorno's riposte to cultural populism: 'In the end, the glorification of splendid underdogs is nothing other than the glorification of the splendid system that makes them so.' In the same way, Crawford's radical Burns is actually a cultural conservative. Burns was vacillating, bombastic, insecure and perfervid by turns, but his poetry is as delicately complex as any. It is about time we stopped trying to press him into a cultural commissar's uniform, even if it does have a 'braw' thistle embroidered on its epaulettes.
David Miller
Rome
Vol. 24 No. 17 · 5 September 2002
From Stephen Holt
Was Thomas Gray a 'Cambridge don', as Robert Crawford suggests (LRB, 25 July)? My understanding is that, as a perpetual 'fellow commoner', he was at most a 'demi-don' who paid extra fees for the dubious privilege of dining and residing with real Cambridge dons.
Stephen Holt
Canberra
