Biographer fascinated with Burns

When Robert Crawford, a professor of modern Scottish literature at the University of St. Andrews in Scotland, started to consider writing a biography of Robert Burns, a colleague "suggested to me that there were so many existing accounts that a new biography of Burns would be 'the world's least necessary book.' "

But when Crawford started looking at what had been done previously, "I decided there was room for one more," he said in a telephone chat from his office at St. Andrews, where he overlooks the ruins of a castle and the edge of the sea.

"A lot of what has been done was old; a lot was stodgy."

Plus, some Burns poems had been rediscovered since any biographies had last been written, "and I came across a manuscript from a journal that no earlier work had used that included a conversation with Burns written down just before his death."

So a new books seemed in order, but that doesn't mean Crawford set an easy task for himself.

"No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns," he notes in the book's introduction. "Passionate, intelligent and a consummate wordsmith, he is the world's most popular love poet. He sought to become, and became, the archetypal national bard. Though it was dangerous to be so in his age and place, he also made himself through tone and temperament the master poet of democracy. All this makes Burns one of the most important authors of modernity, but also one of the hardest to write about. He will not be pigeonholed."

Crawford's book, "The Bard: Robert Burns, a Biography," was released in the United States by Princeton University Press on Jan. 25, the 250th anniversary of Burns' birth, and has received critical and academic acclaim.

"There have been scores, if not hundreds, of biographies of Burns," notes Ian Duncan of the University of California at Berkeley. "Crawford has written one that really justifies the claim of providing a new, original account — indeed, I would say it is as close to being definitive as we are likely to get."

The cover of the American version has a different picture than was on the British edition, Crawford said. "In this picture, Burns looks a bit like a cowboy, which I think was supposed to appeal to American sensibilities. Americans have always responded to Burns as if he was one of their own." Which is not too surprising, if you think about it, he said.

"Burns was a big fan of George Washington. He was very much a republican — not in the modern George Bush sense, but in the French Revolution sense, when many of those ideas were suspect. But that democratic tone of voice comes through under all sorts of conditions."