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.
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.
Can anyone read a biography of Ezra Pound without feeling unsettled? The persistent anti-Semitism; the eager support for Mussolini; the pain and waste of the incarceration, first in a US military detention centre resembling Guantánamo, then in a Washington facility for the insane; the lasting damage done to people in his family circle; the powerful egocentrism at the heart of all this:...
In 1906, May Aldington, a writer and innkeeper, published a novel called Love-letters that Caused a Divorce. It tells the story of Kitty Yorke, who falls in love with a married man. She abandons her marriage in order to run away with her lover, but eventually, after desertion and long hardship, returns to her husband. May Aldington lived long enough to see her son have a protracted series...
Nae knickers, all fur coat Slurped Valvona and Crolla, Tweed-lapelled, elbow-patched, tartan-skirted, Kilted, Higgs-bosoned, tramless, trammelled and trammed, Awash with drowned witches prematurely damned, Prim as skimmed milk, cheesily floodlit, breezily, Galefully, Baltically cold with royal Lashings of tat and Hey-Jimmy wigs, high on swigs Of spinsterish, unmarried malt; City of...
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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