The Modern Poet: Poetry, Academia, and Knowledge since the 1750s (review)

The Modern Poet is dedicated to the memory of Robert Fergusson. It is an act of filial piety that places the author in a lineage that already includes Robert Burns and Robert Louis Stevenson. Stevenson, adding his tribute to Burns's in an attempt to make amends for Fergusson's neglect by the poetic Establishment of his day, spoke of "the three Rabs"; aligning himself with them, Robert Crawford makes a fourth. But his motives are, it emerges, somewhat different from his poetic predecessors' Romantic self-identifications with a figure in whose fate they saw typified the isolated doom of poetic genius. Crawford is interested in Fergusson as an academic poet, university-ducated and with a scholarly bent to his wit, the practitioner of a "poetry of knowledge" whose visionary qualities were effortlessly and inevitably informed by erudition. The Modern Poet illuminates shifting figurations of the poet's role in relation to academia since 1750 (not coincidentally, we must assume, Fergusson's birth date), when the study of "English literature" began in British—primarily Scottish—universities. But it is a complicated and multiply self-reflexive book, not to be mistaken for conventional literary history. A reinterrogation of the subjects of Crawford's earlier scholarly work—on Eliot and Pound, on Scottish academic study of literature and the development of "English" as a discipline in modern universities—it is also a meditation on the logic, and the history, of his own position as a practicing poet-academic. Far from making any attempt to "mask" its author's own interests as a "makar" and a marker (29), the book is a journey into personal poetic and scholarly origins that simultaneously offers a powerfully argued case for their representativeness.

Given this intention, the book's axis of institutional interest is firmly Glasgow, Saint Andrews, Oxford. The modern poet's exemplary predecessors are not Wordsworth and Tennyson, as they might have been had Cambridge, rather than Oxford, figured in the topographical equation, but Jerome Stones—a young, Romantically short-lived poet and Saint Andrews scholar fascinated with collecting, translating, and recomposing Gaelic poetry—James Macpherson, and Arthur Hugh Clough. Crawford argues that Macpherson's controversial "poems of Ossian" were the first product of a university-sponsored poetic canon, at once authentically primitive and fraudulently classical, the voice simultaneously of an ancient Highland bard and a modern committee of scholars. Crawford attributes modernist fluidity to the Ossianic corpus while making large claims for that elusive figure their "author" as an influence on and even a producer of Romanticism. One inheritor of his mantle was Clough, rehabilitated here in a brilliant and sympathetic account as "the modern poet," over the melancholy, nostalgic scholar-gypsy Arnold. For the one, academia was the "launch-site" (147) for a difficult, delightful, tricky poem of knowledge like "The Bothie of Tober-na-fuosich"; for the other, it became a refuge or an escape. Particularly challenging here is the account of Arnold's "Ossianic vision of Oxford" (150), in the first part of Culture and Anarchy , as a place of high sentiments and lost battles. His shift toward social criticism and away from poetry is seen as the consequence of a failure to connect his visionary insights with the conditions of modern life.

The figure of "the modern poet" emerges, too, in poets who have been scholars but not academics: Eliot and Pound, conflicted "double agents" who arrived on the poetic scene "over-brimming with academic training" (184, 171); MacDiarmid and Frost, who expressed great antipathy to the deadening effects of university education but wrote poems crammed with learning; and, more recently, Hughes and Heaney, in both of whose writing Crawford finds the energizing combination of professional and primitive. The book's pivotal contention—and its contentious pivot—is that poetic and academic vocations are not mutually inimical in the modern world; indeed, that "the...