Robert Crawford interview: A Burns to believe in

FOR A MAN WHO'S BEEN DEAD for more than two centuries, there's no getting away from Robert Burns. In this year of Homecoming Scotland, which celebrates the 250th anniversary of his birth, when his old country is hoping he'll spearhead the revival of its tourist industry, that's truer than ever.

There's so much Burnsiana out there already, Don Paterson told his fellow-poet and St Andrews academic Robert Crawford four years ago, that a new biography of Burns would be "the world's least necessary book". Undeterred, Crawford went ahead with his plans to write one: it's published next week, and as a portrait of Burns stripped free of the sentimentality and myths that have settled on his reputation like moss on a statue, it turns out to be a necessary book indeed.

Out goes Victorian historicism, unsubstantiated Burns lore ("some of it is a bit dodgy; you really can't trust it") and "Burns poems" that almost certainly aren't. Above all, out goes that ultra-narrowing of focus Crawford dismisses, in a word he first heard while researching in Ayrshire, as "Burnsamentalist".

In comes 18th-century testimony: Burns's own words where possible, those of contemporaries who knew him where not. In, too, come some "new" poems with sturdier claims to be added to the canon, and an overall portrait based on a surprising number of untapped sources. And precisely because Crawford isn't a Burnsamentalist but someone with a formidably wide knowledge of 18th-century sources, in too comes an appreciation of just how much Burns, for all his laddish wild oats-sowing, was also a man with a mind that was largely made by books.

"People often pat Burns on the head as a 'heaven-taught ploughman', assuming he was an unlearned character," says Crawford, professorially leaning back against a wall of books in his St Andrews study. "But if I was to say to my students, 'Hands up which of you have read a major work of philosophy published in the year of your birth' I wonder how many would be able to do so. Yet Burns read Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, and he knows it well because he refers to it several times. "O wad some Pow'r the giftie gie us/To see oursels as others see us" ... that's just a straight versification of something in Adam Smith.

"That's not everyone's view of Burns. But he was a voracious reader as a child, and I wanted to communicate that too: he's not just a happy-go-lucky lad – there's clearly a bookish side to him. And without all of that to fuse with the passion, the excitement, the sheer vernacular energy of his poetry, he wouldn't be the Burns we know."

Strip away everything but the primary sources, then, and what sort of picture of Burns emerges? Book-obsessed, certainly: reading even at the table, always carrying a book; moulded, suggested his brother Gilbert, by what he read. And, of course, by what he heard: his mother's songs (the few times he mentions her in his letters, she is always singing), the minister's sermons, the ballads he'd have heard at almost every social gathering. So yes, he is the rumbustious, hard-drinking womaniser who founded the Tarbolton Bachelor's Club, but there's another side to him too. This is a man, Crawford argues, "marked for life" by the breakdown he suffered at the age of 23 – a sense of depression and desolation, perhaps, hinted at in the concluding lines of "To a Mouse" ("I backward cast my e'e/On prospects drear!/ And forward, tho I canna see, I guess an' fear!").

As Crawford points out – after concisely placing that poem in the context of Burns's grief at the death of his brother, south Ayrshire's agricultural revolution, and Burns's reading of English poet William Shenstone – underlying all the fears it expresses lies a sympathy with the dispossessed. No-one would doubt that; but what's far more contentious is whether that general identification with the downtrodden impelled Burns towards radical politics. And here Crawford adduces important new evidence. "I didn't realise that right under my nose here in the library we had this journal which contains the last substantial conversation with Burns to be recorded in his lifetime. No other biographers have used it – and the one sentence that jumped out was one in which Burns and one of his friends were described as 'staunch republicans'. Unlike many things said about Burns, it's written down the day after, it's on the spot, first hand."

Crawford's own readings of Burns's poems – that even when they appear loyal to the Crown, there's invariably a slyly radical undertow – had already led him towards this conclusion. But here was proof positive: even though men were being transported for Australia just for expressing such "seditious" political opinions, even though Burns's job as an exciseman and his whole family's security was dependent on him not being disloyal to the Crown, even though Britain was, in 1796, at war with France, the natural home of "staunch republicans", that's precisely how Burns chose to describe himself in private conversation.

Talking to the young Hebridean-born minister Rev James Macdonald over dinner on 1 June, 1796, Burns revealed a dissident streak that struck even his friendly visitor as rash. He talked about how he nearly got into trouble by writing verses attacking the Hanoverians as "an idiot race to honour lost" on a window in Stirling when the worse for drink. He recited a poem he'd composed to celebrate Bonnie Prince Charlie's birthday, and wept at the story of a Jacobite soldier who'd fought at Culloden and was now reduced to penury.

There are plenty of other convincing examples of Burns's impetuosity, sentimentality and radicalism, but this one conversation, near the end of his life, has them all. And Burns was, Macdonald noted (as others did too), such good company: his conversation was just as much to be treasured as his poetry.

Was that the discovery, I wondered, that most gave Crawford a sense of his Burns as a living, breathing man – not just the author of words on the page? After working his way round Scotland's Burns trail, I thought he must have had some sort of epiphany en route? But no: "I think it is just the words on the page. The challenge is to let readers realise that they can get close to Burns; for all that he was born 250 years ago, his words have such strong vernacular attack, they remain accessible."

This, it strikes me, is a refreshingly different, if somewhat ascetic perspective. No poetic imaginings, even when traipsing in his footsteps round Tarbolton or daydreaming in Dumfries, no wondering what Rabbie would have made of this or that; no elegiac pretending; no nonsense about what Burns would have made of the Scotland we live in today, and no unevidenced presuppositions about what Burns made of the world around him either. Nothing waffly, vague; nothing not rigorously tied down to sources.

Non-academic writing about Burns is seldom free from such solecisms; either that, or it loses its way in thickets of detail. But Crawford's unsentimental approach to Burns has much to commend it: when the words themselves are as powerful as his, perhaps they are enough.

That's why in The Best Laid Schemes, a selection of Burns's poetry and prose that he co-edited with Christopher McLachlan – also published this month – Crawford insisted on a line-by-line glossing of the Scots words. Oddly, no other substantial collection of Burns's work in print has this. "To a lot of readers, particularly outside Scotland, the fact that some of Burns's poems are written in Scots can seem to make them inaccessible," he says. "I want to show that there's a vernacular warmth, immediacy and slyness about them."

The five "new" Burns poems – strictly speaking, either newly printed in their entirety or newly attributed – will get the most attention, but that's not Crawford's main intention. They're actually nowhere near as impressive as Burns's best work, and it's getting that to a wider audience that matters more.

Both books will be published in America, where Burns's poetry used to be highly influential: poets such as Robert Frost and Maya Angelou grew up idolising his work. "Burns isn't now as deeply infused in that culture as he used to be," says Crawford. "Part of the job here is to write about him in a way that makes him accessible to an international audience, not least an American one."

The other part of the job is to connect Burns with what's happening now in Scots poetry – which is why he has also edited New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

If we honour Burns with drunken toasts, Robert Crawford mightn't be the right man for the occasion. If we honour the Bard with words on a page, with perceptiveness, clarity and freedom from cant – and three Burns books in a month – he most definitely is.

• The Bard, by Robert Crawford, is published by Jonathan Cape, priced £20. The Best Laid Schemes, Selected Poetry and Prose of Robert Burns, edited by Robert Crawford and Christopher McLachlan, is published by Polygon, priced £12.99. New Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect will be reviewed next week.


Robert Crawford on …

The 'new' Burns poems: "How did I find them? Simply by sitting at home with a cup of coffee and looking online at the National Burns Collection. I simply went through all the manuscripts and checked them against what I knew."

Burns's influence on his own poetry: "Burns does mean quite a lot to me but it would be fatal to imitate him directly. I've approached him once or twice in my poetry, usually obliquely."

Burns clubs: "I'm a bit wary of them, but nevertheless there is a lot in them that is true to the spirit of Burns, to the companionability and warmth that's in the poetry. I'm probably going to too many this year – but at the moment I think I'm going to be spending Burns Night at home with my family."