Robert Crawford: The Emphatic Soul

Robert Crawford is a poet and an influential critic currently teaching at St Andrews University. The “synthetic” writing style of his early poetry, inherited from English and Scottish versions of Modernism, has given way to a more profoundly lyric tone which remains identifiable, however, by its remarkably wide verbal and conceptual scope. His subject matters include information technology, personal memories and spiritual considerations of living on the northern edge of Europe. Keywords: Modernism; Edwin Morgan; Hugh MacDiarmid; T.S. Eliot; Synthetic Scots; Robert Burns; Presbyterianism.

Robert Crawford was born in Bellshill, Lanarkshire, in Central Scotland in 1959. He graduated from Glasgow University and then gained a doctoral degree from Oxford, where he studied alongside his Scottish contemporaries, the poets David Kinloch and W.N. Herbert. He started writing in “aggrandized” Scots and his vocabulary is still best described as eclectic: it is both “synthetic” (in the sense that it is harvested from dictionaries and other written sources of language) and is assembled, like the pieces of a puzzle game, from personal memories of childhood words and local dialect. Celebrating Scotland’s past and present realities in an intelligent, sharp-witted, thoughtful and sometimes laugh-out-loud funny way is one of the most important strands that run through his work. Most of his anthology pieces (such as “Alba Einstein” or “Scotland”) are related to perceptions of Scotland from unexpected viewpoints. His politics are republican but much less radical than, say, Tom Leonard’s. While in his critical studies he faces up to the challenges posed by Anglocentric cultural forms and attitudes, he describes him- self as an “Anglophile Scottish Nationalist” in this interview. Beside various other aspects of Scotland’s realities, he puts an increasing emphasis on his Presbyterian background, which, idiosyncratically, is frequently combined with a tenderly lyrical note in his recent work. Other influences would have to include personal experiences in the family, most important of all the experience of fatherhood, which released new and intense emotions in a poetry that had been, almost habitually, described as “cerebral” and “academic” by reviewers. Crawford’s interest in the vast field of words available for him as a Scoto-English poet has been influenced by his reading of Hugh MacDiarmid and T.S. Eliot. His habit of planting the occasional Scot- tish turn of phrase into a line of what seems Standard English on the 80 Robert Crawford page results in a wordscape that will be both familiar and unfamiliar for English-speaking readers. His love of the human voice means, first of all, a general interest in the resonance of a line and in how the poem works in the utterance; it also extends to a passion for performing po- etry in front of a live audience. He believes that the immediate effect a poem has on the audience may be central to the justification of its existence, though he does not belong among the celebrity poets of our time. Both verbal and conceptual types of humour feature in his early works but recently he is more and more inclined to take solemn and serious, but still quietly intimate, perspectives on life, religion and relationships. His perception of manmade and spiritual realities is structured around his experience of living and working on what he likes to see as the edge of northern Europe. This is a concern he shares with an emerging movement of poets in and around Fife, including John Burnside, Kathleen Jamie, Don Paterson and John Glenday. His contribution to the contemporary poetry scene is vast and various. In 1984 he founded the poetry magazine Verse with David Kinloch, and was appointed Professor of Modern Scottish Poetry at St Andrews in 1989. He was recognised in the 1994 Poetry Society pro- motion of the “New Generation Poets” along with Don Paterson, Mick Imlah, Kathleen Jamie and others. His poetical works include Sharawaggi (with W.N. Herbert, 1990), A Scottish Assembly (1990), Talkies (1992), Masculinity (1996), Spirit Machines (1999), and The Tip of My Tongue (2003), Selected Poems (2005) and his most recent Full Volume (2008). He co-edited The Penguin Book of Poetry from Britain and Ireland since 1945 with Simon Armitage in 1998, and The New Penguin Book of Scottish Verse with Mick Imlah in 2000. He was also co-editor of a series of monographs on various Scottish authors: About Edwin Morgan (with Hamish White, 1990), The Arts of Alasdair Gray (with Thom Nairn, 1991) Reading Douglas Dunn (with David Kinloch, 1992) and Liz Lochhead’s Voices (with Anne Varty, 1994). His critical prose includes The Savage and the City in the Work of T.S. Eliot (1987), Devolving English Literature (1992, with a second edition in 2000), Identifying Poets: Self and Territory in Twentieth-Century Poetry (1993), and The Modern Poet (2001). Recently, he published a splendid biography on Robert Burns at Princeton University Press.