Robert Crawford was Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at St Andrews until 2020. He is the author of Young Eliot, Eliot after ‘The Waste Land’, The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography and Bannockburns: Scottish Independence and Literary Imagination, 1314-2014, as well as several collections of poems, including A Scottish Assembly, Full Volume and Testament.
When I was young I thought poetry and poetry anthologies could change the world. ‘If a man were permitted to make all the ballads,’ Andrew Fletcher of Saltoun wrote, ‘he need not care who should make the laws of a nation.’ But nationality still mattered: Seamus Heaney’s reaction to his inclusion in Blake Morrison and Andrew Motion’s 1982 Penguin Book of...
Age: 22. Time: after 2. RumblingOn western skyline, barrage, tangled tracks, trucks,Jeeps, flags, signposts, dust, oily rags, lorries tumblingOver dark crests, pulverised surface almost liquid, like sticky,Gritty faeces. Men knee-deep in it, goggled facesLost under thick, off-white masks, swigging from hip flasks.
animula blandula vagula
Inside a wide, bucking two-ton, we’re thrownAgainst...
Jorge Luis Borges’s visit to the Home of Golf in 1971 is still remembered. Edwin Williamson devotes a page of his 2004 biography to the event, calling attention to Borges’s wish to recite Scottish Border ballads while in St Andrews, and to stand alone beside the North Sea. Not long before, the 71-year-old Borges had published a story called ‘The Congress’ which, as...
Who can see the green earth any moreAs she was by the sources of Time?Who imagines her fields as they layIn the sunshine, unworn by the plough?
Matthew Arnold, ‘The Future’
Barley field, cut, dried,Brewed, poured, you’re so garrulousLong after you’ve gone.
Old English riddle from the Exeter Book
Very few people will read through all these thousands of pages, and their publication risks making Eliot seem more daunting than ever. While this vast hoard offers scholars all sorts of opportunities, the problem for most common readers is to work out what that word ‘Eliot’ now means. Is ‘Eliot’ still the slim volume of poetry that can be slipped inside a coat pocket? Or does the name now unavoidably bring with it this vast body of letters, plays, poems and prose that can be transported only by fork-lift truck and accessed in full only via a computer in addition to a printed library? Just what the name ‘Eliot’ conjures up has always been a problem.
Sounding out phrases in letters as well as in verse kept things going for T.S. Eliot: he needed a low level of compositional hum. Like a secular spiritual exercise, the letters to Emily Hale sustained...
Can places, like people, have a personality, a set of things you can love or not love? Do countries speak? Do lakes and mountains offer a guide to living? Could you feel let down by a city? Can...
The late Bernard Crick, who had a fine and memorable funeral in Edinburgh the other day, left a legacy of sharp opinions behind him. Among the least popular was his opinion of the British...
Robert Fergusson died in Edinburgh’s Bedlam on 17 October 1774. He was 24 years old. He had been admitted to the asylum three months before, against his will, because his mother could no...
Anthologies are powerful things: movements are launched, periods are parcelled up, writers are made and broken. They are, or want to be, the book world’s performative utterances: defining...
Until recently, the notion that the academic subject called ‘English’ had any sort of history would have seemed rather odd. Hadn’t it always just, well, existed? Surely, at his...
In books that go on about how the English have imposed their language and their manners on other English-speaking nations (Australian, Canadian, Scottish and Welsh and Irish, others), what is...
Whether in person or in print, self-consciousness is unsettling. Self-conscious writers, like self-conscious speakers, can’t help betraying that they’re more concerned with their...
‘The idea that Eliot’s poetry was rooted in private aspects of his life has now been accepted,’ says Lyndall Gordon in the Foreword to her second volume of biographical rooting...
Read anywhere with the London Review of Books app, available now from the App Store for Apple devices, Google Play for Android devices and Amazon for your Kindle Fire.
For highlights from the latest issue, our archive and the blog, as well as news, events and exclusive promotions.