POETRY OFTEN LIKES TO GO OFFROAD: Robert Crawford Interviewed by Jiří Flajšar and Pavlína Flajšarová (original) (raw)
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Poetry Often Likes To Go Offroad: An Interview with Robert Crawford
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ROBERT CRAWFORD Interviewed by Jiří Flajšar and Pavlína Flajšarová Robert Crawford is a Scottish poet, scholar, and critic. He studied at Glasgow University and Oxford University, where he got his doctorate. Since 1989, he has taught at the University of St Andrews, where he is currently a professor of English. He has published six books of poetry and more than two dozen other books on poetry, literature, history, and culture. His most recent books include Young Eliot (Cape, 2015), a new biography of the famous poet, Testament (Cape, 2014), the latest volume of Crawford’s own poetry, and Bannockburns (Edinburgh University Press, 2014), a major volume of Scottish literary history. The essential part of this interview with Professor Crawford was completed in a bar at Svatý Kopeček near Olomouc on November 20, 2013. Additional questions were posed by email and answered by Crawford during the winter of 2013/14. The interview predates a crucial referendum on Scottish independence, which took place in Scotland on September 18 2014 and did not go the way he favoured. Another major thing has happened since the interview took place—as of 2015, Crawford’s biography of T. S. Eliot, Young Eliot, a project that he talks about here, has been published by Cape (U.K.) and Farrar (U.S.).
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After the Second World War, poetry in Scotland required regeneration. The Scottish Renaissance of the 1920s and 1930s had been a major force of revitalisation, led by Hugh MacDiarmid (C.M. Grieve, 1892-1978), aligning poetry, literature and all the arts in Scotland with renewed political ambition for an independent nation. After the war, MacDiarmid was still a major force among the new generation of poets, but the younger men and women would not follow his lead in any direct sense, and in any case, MacDiarmid had nothing but disdain for disciples. The prevailing imperative among the major poets who began publishing in the late 1940s, 1950s and 1960s was not one of nationalism but of individual voice, language and, crucially, location. Each had their own favoured terrain in different parts of Scotland, a geography of the imagination that made singular use of coordinate points drawn from their places of birth or upbringing, their societies and languages. Most of them were men. The generation of poets who began publishing in the 1970s and 1980s, many of the best of them women, brought another kind of regeneration, in terms of gendered identity. These poets demonstrated that their perspectives and experiences as women were as valid and valuable as those of the men of the previous generation, from whom they had learned much, and further, that regardless of gender-experience, their enquiries and judgements were equally valid and vital. From the 1990s through to the twenty-first century, the increasing range of priorities and perspectives challenges any simplification of overall trend, but the general sense of multi-facetedness, plurality or diversity, within the changing dynamics of an increasingly self-aware, politicised nation, was repeatedly demonstrated by, and characteristic of, all the poets working in this era. One book consolidates the immediate postwar situation: Modern Scottish Poetry: An
The International Companion to Scottish Poetry
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, and in particular the colleagues of the department of Scottish Literature, for generously hosting me as an Honorary Research Fellow in 2010-11. It was there, in one of the friendliest and most stimulating professional environments in my life so far, that the project of the present volume took shape. I am especially grateful to the series editors, Ian Brown and Thomas Owen Clancy, for their support throughout the stages of preparing the book, and to the ASLS Director, Duncan Jones, for overseeing its production. Finally, a special thanks goes to my mother, who taught me love of words and beauty. To her memory, this volume is dedicated. xi A Note on the Text Quotations from poems and the titles of poems written in languages other than English and Scots are provided in the original language in regular type, followed by translation in italics. Gaelic poets are indicated by their Gaelic name, followed by its English version in parenthesis. An exception has been made for those poets who are internationally known by their English name: in these cases, it is the Gaelic name that follows parenthetically. The collections of poems or anthologies whose full bibliographical details can be traced freely on the Internet are indicated in the text only by title and publication date. Fuller details are provided in endnotes for old and rare primary sources. Secondary sources are regularly referenced in endnotes.
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