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.
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...
Overnight I’ve listened to thirty Vancouver stories, Not leaving my room. My jet-lagged ear Tunes in to verticals beaming cold H2O Ten levels higher, twenty ceilings below, Blueprinting every floor of the building, Floating each a little, draining it slowly away Down chutes, round U-bends. Hung-over minibar glasses Emit high pings, a dawn chorus of different pitches,...
King of England from 1461, born Atlanta, Georgia, always Zealous Orleanist, became Cricketer, administrator, son Of trade unionist, Irish mother leader Of Gaelic revival, debuting Covent Garden, Wurttemberg, Sardinia; fought Crimean War, Fifth of seven, acquiring nickname ‘Hetman of the Cossacks of the Don’. After carrying army across Bosporus on bridge of...
Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit.Croy: an animal pen, a rained-on pigsty Snorting with mooning bums of bacon, snouts Spike-haired, buxom, Pictish-beasty, rank.Croy. Ee. Gaw. Lonker. Pit. Croy. Once, dogging off a dig on the Antonine Wall, Knees-to-chin in the back of a Beetle near Croy, I eyed the triumphal arches of Castlecary’s British Empire viaduct above Turfed-over Roman barracks. Soil...
God-mulch. Apollo. Coventina. Snapped-off moons and pre-Christian crosses
Pit the tor. Comeback king, Midas-touch Mithras, his moorland shrines
Dank caves or knee-high proto-kirks North-west of Hexham, waits
First for microbial, then feather-thin, Then skull-thick, unscabbarded dawn
Butchering the bull-black darkness, Cutting Christmas Eve’s throat.
Mithraic puddles freeze...
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...
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