Guessing where Robert Crawford stands on the question of Scottish independence is not difficult. As a critic and academic, his books include The Scottish Invention of English Literature, a biography of Robert Burns and, earlier this year, Bannockburns, in which he examined writers’ responses to the issue since the emblematic Scottish victory at the battle of 1314. As a poet, Crawford’s 1990 debut collection was called A Scottish Assembly and included not one, but two poems entitled “Scotland”. Since then his eight volumes of verse have featured poems named after Scottish places and public figures as well as “Scotch Broth” and “The Auld Enemy”. In his latest collection, Testament, published this month, there are poems called “The Scottish Constitution”, “Flodden” and “Daveheart”, in which the prime minister – “St George o’ Osborne tae hi richt / And SamCam by his side” – and his stance on independence do not emerge well: “Nae every battle’s won, ye ken / On the playin fields o Eton”.
“Yes, I would like to see an independent Scotland,” Crawford announces straightforwardly. “But at the same time, I’m conscious that political poetry is not fashionable or easy to pull off. So on the one hand, I didn’t want something that was simply sloganeering; on the other, I didn’t want something that was so even-handed that it didn’t do anything. Like most Scottish people, I have mixed feelings about Britain and Britishness, and so part of the attraction is playing with different acoustics. While something like ‘Daveheart’ is a plain balladic acoustic, I also like to use language and rhyme in ways you can’t quite predict. In the same way that I hope the politics of this series is not absolutely predictable, either.”
On the cover of Testament is an image of a Luckenbooth brooch, a traditional Scottish love token comprised of linked hearts and a crown. At the centre of the book is a series of intertwined relationships: there are love poems, poems that explore relationships between languages – versions of CP Cavafy from the Greek, poems in Scots, reworkings of New Testament verse – poems about people he knew, such as an elegy for poet Mick Imlah with whom Crawford co-edited an anthology of Scottish verse, as well as poems about the relationship between history and values.
He is someone who has “thought quite a lot about national identity and literature”, and says that when he examined the relationship between Scotland and England, he was struck by the longstanding Scottish literary investment in Britishness. “You can trace it back to about the time of the 1707 Union. There is James Thomson writing ‘Rule Britannia’, then Tobias Smollett, then Walter Scott and right up to John Buchan after which the literary articulation of Britishness does drop off. But where are the great English novels of Britishness? They don’t exist. Whatever else Scott is about, Waverley ends with a vision of Britishness and a British union. You just don’t get that in Dickens or George Eliot or in the English novel as a whole. The only major English novel set in Scotland is To the Lighthouse, and in that, Scotland is really only standing in for the south-west of England.”
He does concede that poetry is a little different with the “Scotophilia” of the Romantic period, “but probably the best-known English text about Scotland is still Macbeth. I would suggest there might be a dash of Scotophobia in Shakespeare, and if your knowledge of Scotland came from Macbeth, you wouldn’t really want to go there. I think that says a lot about the two cultures, their attitudes to Britishness, and to each other.”
Although Crawford says he is “not a politician”, he is happy for his work to be seen as an intervention in the political debate. His 1992 study Devolving English Literature “had a political title and was part of the pressure towards devolution as Bannockburns points in the direction of Scottish independence”. Some of the poems in Testament now join that long conversation. “In the last 80 years, the ideas and ideal of Scottish independence have moved from being absolutely mad to being reasonably conceivable, and now, in Scotland at least, mainstream. That is an astonishing trajectory. It’s been six years since my last full collection, which sounds like a long time, but there are words and phrases in it that I’ve carried round for decades. I first encountered Cavafy in my late teens. I have grown up with those biblical stories since childhood. So six years isn’t that much, really. It’s a long game after all.”
Crawford was born in 1959 and brought up in “lower middle-class suburban Glasgow”. Both his parents had left school at 14 and both had become bank tellers. There were books at home, but they tended to belong to his grandparents rather than his parents. “We had Shakespeare and Burns and Tennyson in old leather bindings. It took me a long time to read them, but I did like having these totemic objects in the house.”
One of his grandfathers had been a minister, and the family were churchgoers. Crawford has written about faith in his poetry. “It is something that has ebbed and flowed for me,” he says, describing it as currently “pretty vestigial”. But the parables and words of Christ have “meant an enormous amount” to him, and his versions in Testament attempt, in lines of sometimes just one or two words, “to let them stand as poetry by running through them a thread of rhyme. It comes and goes so there is a sort of acoustic faith that runs through the poems in a rather wavering way.”
Crawford attended a grant-maintained school where he rejected Burns in favour of TS Eliot, who has been an abiding love ever since. His first book was a study of Eliot and he is now working on a biography. “I wouldn’t have expressed it this way at the time, but I think I was being force-fed what was meant to be my Scottish identity and I reacted against that. Of course I love Burns now, but it took me a long time to come round to him.”
While a student at Glasgow University Crawford voted against Scottish devolution in the 1979 referendum and it wasn’t until he went to Oxford as a postgraduate that he became convinced “that I came from a different country and culture. I’d never met any public schoolboys until I went there, so it was a bit of a culture shock. People thought I was very working-class just because I had a Scottish accent. I knew I was a polite middle-class boy, but the two cultures have difficulty reading each other, sometimes literally. I get frustrated when people want to paint me into some sort of stereotypical Scottish box. I don’t like football, having been put off by the sectarianism attached to it. I don’t like porridge, either.”
At Oxford, Crawford was a joint founder of the internationalist poetry magazine Verse and “cadged” poems off the likes of Edwin Morgan, Les Murray and Seamus Heaney, who enclosed £50 with his poem to help with production costs: “His generosity was not only in language, but also in actual dosh.”
Crawford’s own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – “I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems” – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially “stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant. It was cold, but could it be warmed up? Could it be used to express, say, eroticism and also a sense of love of country?”
In the late 80s he won an Eric Gregory award, joining an outstanding generation of Scottish poets that included John Burnside, Don Paterson and Kathleen Jamie. His early critical work – by now as a lecturer at St Andrews University, where he has remained ever since – included studies of living Scottish writers Alasdair Gray, Liz Lochhead, Edwin Morgan and Douglas Dunn. His poetry combined an interest in language, technology and politics as well as deeply personal material.
He married the academic Alice Crawford in 1988 and they have two children, but, he says, for a time they didn’t think they’d be able to have children “and I found that difficult as I wanted very much to become a father”. He addresses the subject in his 1996 collection, Masculinity, “at a time when there was much talk of damaged masculinity in Scottish writing in books such as Trainspotting. I wanted to do something different and I was glad to get those poems out. Poetry has to talk about love, although, as quite a repressed person in some ways, I initially found it easier to write erotic poetry in Scots, partly because I thought it would be safer if people didn’t understand exactly what was going on.”
In Testament Crawford provides an English gloss to the Cavafy poems he has translated into Scots, but says the fact that they will sound “strange to many people, including many Scottish people, and yet at the same time familiar is maybe no bad way for poetry in translation to sound.” Although Crawford can’t speak any foreign languages, he says he was lucky to have studied Greek at school and to have read some Homer. “The same is true of the Bible. It gave me a sense of poetry as an ancient and abiding art form that at its very best just didn’t go out of date. I still cleave to that.” Crawford was insistent on opening the anthology of Scottish verse he co-edited with Imlah with a poem in Latin, “emphasising the polylingual and multicultural nature of Scottish poetry from its very beginnings. This should be done for English verse, too, which needn’t start roughly with Chaucer. There is significant English poetry in Latin, old French and a variety of languages. It should be opened up. To find such diversity at the origin of things is a very positive thing to do.”
And he takes this approach into his nationalism, citing Imlah as an example of an inclusive Scottishness. “He was Scottish and he wasn’t. He was really an English public schoolboy, but I welcome the idea of people who are in some ways not Scottish, yet are committed to Scotland. You could say JK Rowling was such a person. Scotland and Scottish identity should be rich and complicated and not unduly reductive.” As to independence, he says it is in the balance and he is “not sure it will be achieved this time. But I’m sure it will not go away. Of course if the vote does go our way it will be a risk, but I think we’ll come through it all right.” He declares himself “optimistic”, expressing the hope that some of his poems are not only “a gentle articulation of love for Scotland, but also an aspiration for a possible independent Scottish future. For me there is a lyrical attraction to the notion of Scottish independence. I don’t think it should simply be about economics. It should be about culture and aspiration and values.”
• This article was amended on 28 February 2022. An earlier version misnamed Robert Crawford’s 1990 collection A Scottish Assembly, as A Scottish Declaration.
