Most Popular Books by Robert Crawford

"A biography of T. S. Eliot from his birth in St. Louis in 1888 to his publication of The Waste Land in 1922"-- Provided by publisher.

Young Eliot: From St. Louis to "The Waste Land" was hailed as “exceptional” and “assiduous” (The New York Times). Robert Crawford’s meticulous, incisive scholarship continues in Eliot After "The Waste Land", an invaluable record of the revolutionary modernist, visionary poet, and troubled man. After being kept from the public for more than fifty years, the letters between T. S. Eliot and his longtime love and muse Emily Hale were unsealed in 2020. Drawing on these intimate exchanges and on countless interviews and archives, as well as on Eliot’s own poetry and prose, the award-winning biographer Robert Crawford completes the narrative he began in Young Eliot. Eliot After “The Waste Land”, the long-awaited second volume of Crawford’s magisterial, meticulous portrait of the twentieth century’s most significant poet, tells the story of the mature Eliot during his years as a world-renowned writer and intellectual, including his complex interior life. Chronicling Eliot’s 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 shows us the public and personal experiences that helped inspire Eliot’s later masterpieces. Crawford describes the poet’s conversion to Anglo-Catholicism, his separation from Vivien Haigh-Wood and his happy second marriage to Valerie Fletcher, his editorship at Faber and Faber, his Nobel Prize, his great work Four Quartets, and his adventures in the theater. Crawford presents this complex and remarkable man not as a literary monument but as a human being: as husband, lover, and widower; as banker, editor, playwright, and publisher; and most of all as an epoch-shaping poet struggling to make art amid personal disasters.

No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns. Wonderfully readable, The Bard catches Burns''s energy, brilliance, and radicalism as never before. To his international admirers he 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 number of untapped sources--from rediscovered poetry by Burns to manuscript journals, correspondence, and oratory by his contemporaries--this new biography presents the remarkable life, loves, and struggles of the great poet. Inspired by the American and French Revolutions and molded by the Scottish Enlightenment, Burns was in several senses the first of the major Romantics. 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 elan 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 biography startlingly demonstrates why the life and work of Scotland''s greatest poet still compel the attention of the world a quarter of a millennium after his birth.

Robert Crawford''s new collection is an exhilarating celebration of the world he lives in: his family, his fellow Scots, his country and his country''s languages. Beginning with a group of moving, renewing love poems to his wife, the book builds into a polyphonic hymn to life in all its aspects. There is a powerful sense of communion and connection in The Tip of My Tongue: while singing the Scottish part of the planet, Crawford also embraces the rhythms of the whole circumference - from Perth, Scotland, to Perth, Australia - catching ''how Kincardineshire''s sky''s/Transvaalish, Budapesty, Santa Barbaran,/Zurich on a perfect day''. These are poems that are convincingly earthed in the land and the language yet unafraid of spiritual, even religious notes; richly lyrical and passionate yet shot through with a humour and a vitality that is utterly engaging. As Liam McIlvanney wrote in the Sunday Herald, ''for intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed among recent Scottish poets''.

Holding in balance the ecological and the technological, ancient and modern, Full Volume sings languages and cultures, people and habitats burgeoning on the brink of extinction. From revved-up battle-cry to nervous whisper, these lyrical poems praise intricate abundance. Assured in its rhymes and cadences, Full Volume is often attentive to poetry in other tongues, not least Gaelic. As their tones and forms shift from the spiritual to the wry, from haiku to brosnachadh, the poems'' resonance and music build into a sustained sounding of what it means to live, love, and listen in a world where ''Nothing is ever single''.

SPIRIT MACHINES, Robert Crawford''s fourth collection, attends imaginatively to the fusion of spiritual experience and the insistently material world. In several of the poems, emotional and religious insights merge lyrically with modern technologies of information. The title sequence deals with bereavement and memorializes the poet''s father, who died in1997, while the serio-comical catechism of ''A Life-Exam'' arises from the experience of hospitalisation. The imaginative, 360-line tour de force ''Impossibility'' presents a swirling underwater world imaging the heroic struggle of the nineteenth-century writer and mother, Margaret Oliphant. While some of the poems communicate a sense of hurt and loss, others are insuperably comic, giving the collection an ambitious range and vitality. Throughout the book, Robert Crawford''s alert sense of Scotland provides a source and sounding-board for poems -lyrics, ballads, verse narratives and prose poems - that are finely nuanced, moving, and excitingly resourceful.

To make a testament is to attempt to pass on what matters most. In his seventh full-length collection of poems Robert Crawford writes of love, loss, belief, and commitment. Whether in intimate erotic lyrics or in a sustained engagement with the politics of Scottish independence he writes with passion, wit, and assurance about struggles to pass on values and treasures. The book opens with a sequence of love poems, and closes with ‘Testament’, a startlingly fresh gathering of deftly rhymed paraphrases based on the New Testament. Whether making versions of Cavafy or elegising fellow poet Mick Imlah, or writing how a father hands on a piece of marble to his son, Robert Crawford shows in Testament how poetry can communicate from generation to generation aspects of what makes us most vulnerably and engagingly human.

This widely-praised book looks at the rise and fall of ''Britishness'' in literature over the last three centuries. Arguing that for much of its history the subject of ''English Literature'' has been bound up with an assumed English cultural centre, Devolving English Literature examines the literary construction and questioning of a British (rather than simply English) literary identity. Surveying eighteenth and nineteenth-century writers, including Robert Burns, James Boswell, Walter Scott and Thomas Carlyle, Robert Crawford remaps literary history. He argues that Scottish and non-metropolitan authors left a crucial legacy to American literature, to the developing subject of anthropology, and to twentieth-century Modernism. In the work of T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Hugh MacDiarmid and other Modernists there persist vitally ''provincial'' as well as national elements. These continue to nourish the verse of sophisticated post-British ''barbarian'' poets such as Seamus Heaney, Tony Harrison, Douglas Dunn, Les Murray, and Derek Walcott. More than that, they are bound up with the contemporary literature and politics of Britain after devolution.This second edition contains a substantial new chapter, ''Waving Citizens'', which looks particularly at Scottish writing in the light of the political events that saw the establishment of a national Parliament in Edinburgh in 1999. Topics considered range from Walter Scott and European union to Trainspotting and right-wing politics. This new chapter argues for the need to read Scottish literature in ways that alert us not just to its political significance, but also to the breadth of its tonal spectrum, so that Muriel Spark and Kathleen Jamie are as much part of a redefined Scottish literary identity as are Irvine Welsh and James Kelman.Praise for the first edition:''A stunning book: original, extraordinarily wide-ranging, coherent, reflective, and strongly argued.'' - Susan Staves, Studies in

Traversing the globe, Old World is a generous, playful collection about the issues facing our planet today, from a major Scots poet and biographer of T.S. Eliot ''For intellectual range, emotional depth, and lexical shimmer, Crawford is unsurpassed'' Sunday Herald Mixing lyricism, play, and vulnerability, Old World explores the issues facing our planet in the twenty-first century, from European war to climate change and AI. From riddles and haikus to verse influenced by both Western and Eastern cultures, Crawford arrives at a sense of sacredness of life on earth. These poems speak both of the menaced plenitude of living beings, and of frailties associated with growing old. Part of the book is given over to voices of creatures from the non-human world, part to human voices, but boundaries between these categories become mischievously and disconcertingly unstable. ‘A poet of great importance... fluent, inventive, funny, crackling with intellectual energy, and at the very heart of our own time’ Scotsman ''In his hands, all modern life can be poetry’ Herald

From Treasure Island to Trainspotting, Scotland''s rich literary tradition has influenced writing across centuries and cultures far beyond its borders. Here, for the first time, is a single volume presenting the glories of fifteen centuries of Scottish literature. In Scotland''s Books the much loved poet Robert Crawford tells the story of Scottish imaginative writing and its relationship to the country''s history. Stretching from the medieval masterpieces of St. Columba''s Iona - the earliest surviving Scottish work - to the energetic world of twenty-first-century writing by authors such as Ali Smith and James Kelman, this outstanding account traces the development of literature in Scotland and explores the cultural, linguistic and literary heritage of the nation. It includes extracts from the writing discussed to give a flavor of the original work, and its new research ranges from specially made translations of ancient poems to previously unpublished material from the Scottish Enlightenment and interviews with living writers. Informative and readable, this is the definitive single-volume guide to the marvelous legacy of Scottish literature.

In MASCULINITY, Robert Crawford elegantly explores many aspects of that troubling concept, from imperial militarism to his own experiences as father, husband, and son. By turn affectionate and amusing, painful and self-excoriating, Crawford wryly examines, sometimes in intimate detail, what it is to be male - from awkward, unsporty and even more awkward adolescent, to husband, father of a child and, apparently, New Man. Clever, accessible, very funny and chillingly accurate, MASCULINITY is a sparklingly original collection. Star Trek Epigrams Mr Sulu, set the controls To Economy Wash. We''re about to venture Where no man has gone before. Kirk to enterprise: ''I''m going back to my cabin With a box of Kleenex. I want to experience the lonliness of Command. ''

The twin concerns of primitive and metropolitan life nourished T.S. Eliot''s imagination through his childhood and student years and developed to mould and underpin his writing. Ranging from Dr Sweany of St Louis and Eliot''s intense interest in anthropology to his interest in Victorian urban writing and popular American models, this book throws new light on Eliot''s major works, particularly on The Waste Land and Sweeney Agonistes. In understanding how a great poet obsessively and continually brought together `savages'' and the sophisticated as well as slum-dwelling members of modern urban society, we can see his work afresh as possessing remarkable and profound excitement as well as unusual integrity.

I am writing this book for the people of the world. I am hoping that you can receive the hope and inspiration that I have and that you can see that you are not alone in your struggles. You will be able to see with what is in this book all that I have encountered in my life and that I am still here. I believe that I am here to show you that there is hope and a purpose for your life.

disAPPOINTED: There is always room for improvement in all of us! Your outlook and perceptions of life''s various situations determine the person you will become or have became. disAPPOINTED will help you redefine the struggles you have had in life. It will help you discover your determination to recover, and help you manifest your own strength and courage through Jesus Christ. It aids you in seeing the lesson for the blessing by reminding you when you are disAPPOINTED that God said "Didn''t I Say Appointed!"