Search results for ""author robert crawford""

Did you know the Battle of Bannockburn had its own poet-in-residence? Starting in 1314 and coming right up to the present day, poet and critic Robert Crawford examines how writers have set out in poetry, fiction, plays and on film the ideal of Scottish independence. Beginning with medieval commemorations of Bannockburn, this sweeping and ambitious book also includes the most detailed consideration of what independence meant to Robert Burns.

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Robert Crawford is Professor of Modern Scottish Literature in the School of English at the University of St Andrews. His seven collections of poems include Full Volume (Cape, 2008), Testament (Cape, 2014) and Apollos of the North (Birlinn, 2006), which featured his English translations alongside poems in Latin by George Buchanan and Arthur Johnston. Together with Mick Imlah he is co-editor of The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse (2000), while his prose books include biographies of Robert Burns and T. S. Eliot. He lives in St Andrews with his wife and two children.

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Did you know the Battle of Bannockburn had its own poet-in-residence? Starting in 1314 and coming right up to the present day, poet and critic Robert Crawford examines how writers have set out in poetry, fiction, plays and on film the ideal of Scottish independence. Beginning with medieval commemorations of Bannockburn, this sweeping and ambitious book also includes the most detailed consideration of what independence meant to Robert Burns. Concentrating on Scottish writing, it considers, too, imaginative work by male and female authors from England to North America and Australia. This book is full of surprises: from the bestselling Romantic fiction from Surrey that nourished Braveheart to the subtle, Manhattan-born nationalist sparring partner of Hugh MacDiarmid. Bannockburns helps explain the intellectual formation of modern Scottish nationalism, and concludes with a detailed look at how contemporary Scottish authors have reacted in their writing to the arguments of Scotland's independence referendum. This is the only book to set out in full what Scottish independence has meant in literature. It shows how for 700 years the Battle of Bannockburn has remained a key reference point.

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Edinburgh and Glasgow enjoy a famously scratchy relationship. Resembling other intercity rivalries throughout the world, from Madrid and Barcelona, to Moscow and St. Petersburg, to Beijing and Shanghai, Scotland’s sparring metropolises just happen to be much smaller and closer together—like twin stars orbiting a common axis. Yet their size belies their world-historical importance as cultural and commercial capitals of the British Empire, and the mere forty miles between their city centers does not diminish their stubbornly individual nature.Robert Crawford dares to bring both cities to life between the covers of one book. His story of the fluctuating fortunes of each city is animated by the one-upping that has been entrenched since the eighteenth century, when Edinburgh lost parliamentary sovereignty and took on its proud wistfulness, while Glasgow came into its industrial promise and defiance. Using landmarks and individuals as gateways to their character and past, this tale of two cities mixes novelty and familiarity just as Scotland’s capital and its largest city do. Crawford gives us Adam Smith and Walter Scott, the Scottish Enlightenment and the School of Art, but also tiny apartments, a poetry library, Spanish Civil War volunteers, and the nineteenth-century entrepreneur Maria Theresa Short. We see Glasgow’s best-known street through the eyes of a Victorian child, and Edinburgh University as it appeared to Charles Darwin.Crawford's lively account, drawing on a wealth of historical and literary sources, affirms what people from Glasgow and Edinburgh have long doubted—that it is possible to love both cities at the same time.

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Robert Crawford is a poet, biographer, critic and literary historian who has published eight full collections of poetry and many prose books, including two major biographies of T.S. Eliot: Young Eliot and Eliot After The Waste Land. Emeritus Wardlaw Professor of Poetry at the University of St Andrews, he is a Fellow of the British Academy, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Foreign Member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

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'Absolutely the most important book of our era.' Virginia Woolf Textual Non Sense is mischievous, minimalist, and revolutionary: a short fuse intended to spark a fundamental re-thinking of how we engage with notions of canon. Classic texts are mangled, quotes are mis-attributed, and great authors are misidentified as Robert Crawford brings literature and chaos theory together in a romance made on Tinder. William Shakespeare of the School of Literature and Bookmaking introduces a survey of writers' struggles. John Buchan provides his guide to writing a best-seller (blotting paper plays a key role). Professor Mike Foucault employs Big Data to investigate the new discipline, ‘Creaticism', or 'Critive Writing.'Humour and literary criticism tend to go together like apples and arsenic. Textual Non Sense argues that humour is an essential corrective--a missing ingredient to a cure for the arthritis and calcification of academic literary criticism. ‘I just can’t wait for the American edition!’ Emily Dickinson

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One of Scotland’s most celebrated poets, Robert Crawford has long been a passionate and articulate ambassador for his country and its culture, its people and its landscape. The Scottish Ambassador fuses individual and communal voices in poems that resonate far beyond their points of origin. Engaging with Zoroastrian, Chinese and Greek as well as with Scottish antecedents, Crawford’s poems have an arresting range and a lyrical energy. He negotiates with intensity and wit between a deep sense of human universals and a heartfelt fidelity to individual places. Ranging from Jerusalem to Iona, New York City to Shetland, this is a collection of international range that continually zeroes in on the particular – and the particularly Scottish. At the book’s centre is a series of intimate, funny, eloquent portraits of cities which are at once remarkable public poems and outpourings of love.

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No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard. To his international admirers Burns was a genius, a hero, a warm-hearted friend; yet to the mother of one of his lovers he was a wastrel, to a fellow poet he was 'sprung...from raking of dung', and to his political enemies a 'traitor'. Drawing on a surprising variety of untapped sources - from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, interviews and oratory by his contemporaries - this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves and struggles of the great poet.With a poet's insight and a shrewd sense of human drama, Robert Crawford outlines how Burns combined a childhood steeped in the peasant song-culture of rural Scotland with a consummate linguistic artistry to become not only the world's most popular love poet but also the controversial master poet of modern democracy. Written with accessible élan and nuanced attention to Burns's poems and letters, The Bard is the story of an extraordinary man fighting to maintain a sly sense of integrity in the face of overwhelming pressures. This incisive, intelligent biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland's greatest poet still compels the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

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The Book of St Andrews juxtaposes poems, stories and memoirs with scant regard to chronological order, but in the confidence that each contribution, lively in its own right, may also enhance the others. The anthology, like the town, contains golfers, kids from the caravan site, students and professors, born Fifers and visitors from near and far parts of the planet. Some contributors live and work in St Andrews; others passed through some time ago; one or two, like Homer or St Andrew, never saw the place, but are linked to it regardless. Here are specially written stories by Meaghan Delahunt, A.L. Kennedy, and Sarah Hall; new poems by Seamus Heaney, Paul Muldoon, and Don Paterson; memoirs by Kay Redfield Jamison and Ian Rankin.

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The second volume of Robert Crawford's magisterial biography of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet and troubled man, drawing on extensive new sources.In this compelling and meticulous portrait of the twentieth century's most important poet, Robert Crawford completes the story he began in Young Eliot. Drawing on extensive new sources and letters, this is the first full-scale biography to make use of Eliot's most significant surviving correspondence, including the archive of letters (unsealed for the first time in 2020) detailing his decades-long love affair with Emily Hale. This long-awaited second volume, Eliot After 'The Waste Land', tells the story of the mature Eliot, his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, and his troubled interior life. From his time as an exhausted bank employee after the publication of The Waste Land, through the emotional turmoil of the 1920s and 1930s, and his years as a firewatcher in bombed wartime London, Crawford reveals the public and personal experiences that helped generate some of Eliot's masterpieces. He explores the poet's religious conversion, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, and his great work Four Quartets. Robert Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as a husband, lover and widower, as a banker, editor, playwright and publisher, but most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art among personal disasters.

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Discover the poetry of Carl Sandburg in Poetry for Kids: Carl Sandburg. Carefully chosen for kids, these 35 poems are presented, illustrated, and explained by an expert. There is no better time to introduce children to poetry and literature than during their formative years. That is why professor and scholar Kate Benzel has used her wealth of experience to carefully curate 35 of Carl Sandburg's luminary poems into one collection that is specially designed for children. In Poetry for Kids: Carl Sandburg you'll find many classics, some of which you may remember from your childhood, including "Young Bullfrogs," "Shenandoah", "Jazz Fantasia", "Fog", and 31 more of Sandburg's favorite and most accessible works. Accompanying the words are beautifully illustrated scenes by award-winning illustrator Robert Crawford. This gentle introduction includes commentary, definitions of key words, and an introduction to the poet's life, plus a final synopsis of the author's interpretation of the pieces.

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This book features new essays on Burns' special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture. This volume examines the innovative and technically accomplished nature of Burns' poetry. Close readings explore his dialogues with earlier poets such as John Milton, Thomas Gray, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson and these sit alongside analyses of the creative responses of his contemporaries and literary heirs including William Wordsworth, James Hogg, Thomas Dermody, Hugh MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown, Don Paterson and Seamus Heaney. They demonstrate how Burns drew on Scottish vernacular traditions, English poetry and 18th-century sentimentalism to create his own, new kind of poetry. The contributors include leading poet-critics Douglas Dunn and the award-winning Burns author Robert Crawford alongside experts in poetry criticism Stephen Gill and Patrick Crotty. It features two poems written especially for the volume by Bernard O'Donoghue and Andrew McNeillie.

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