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.
Poets need to dig in. This involves psychological concentration, a focus on the act of writing, but also on how to limber up for writing: they must be open to the often accidental stimuli that nourish poems. Travel can encourage this, but too much travel dilutes it. For many poets familiar ground is best. Tennyson had the gateposts of his house distinctively painted so that he didn’t...
after the Latin of George Buchanan (1506-82)
Diogio de Murca, Head and King, Rector of Coimbra University, We all admire the way you’ve got ahead, But your Sub-King Co-ordinator of Commercialisation, your Head of Advanced, Enhanced Entrepeneurship, that wee Master Beleago, MBA (Monster of Bestial Accumulation) Whose ugly hooves tramp on our heads Is so pigheadedly convinced That he has...
after the Latin ‘Adventus in Galliam’ of George Buchanan (1506-82)
Badlands of Portugal, bye-bye For ever, starving crofts whose year-round crop Is lack of cash. And you, fair France, bonjour! Bonjour, adoring sponsor of the arts, Your air’s to die for, and your earth’s so rich Vineyards embrace your warm, umbrageous hills, Cows crowd your pastures, glens gabble with...
after the Latin ‘Franciscanus’ of George Buchanan (1506-82)
A barren haugh. No flowers, no trees for miles. No use for harvest. Barbed-wire thistles spatter Dour, poisoned fields. Bare space. Hoofprints of cows. Dysart, folk call it. Under desert earth Vulcan’s mile-long unmined coal still smeeks In runnelled caves. Random, lung-clogging fires Belch out all over through the...
The hare wasn’t there. The hare was nowhere To be seen, a sheen Of kicked-up dust, the hare’s coat, Every hair of the flank of the hare so sleek, so chic, It was sponsored, it caressed his physique. Out of sight, out of mind, the unsponsored tortoise fell Into a vertical sleep that sank him deep Down in his shell. He dreamed. He smelled the smell Of formula one. The...
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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