Alan Norman Bold (1943–1998) was a Scottish poet, biographer, and journalist. He was born in Edinburgh.
He edited Hugh MacDiarmid's Letters and wrote the influential biography MacDiarmid. Bold had acquainted himself with MacDiarmid in 1963 while still an English Literature student at Edinburgh University. His debut work, Society Inebrious, with a lengthy introduction by MacDiarmid, was published in 1965, during Bold's final university year. This early publication kick-started a prolific poetic career with Bold publishing another three books of verse before the end of the decade, including the ambitious book-length poem The State of the Nation. He also edited The Penguin Book of Socialist Verse (1970) and published a 1973 biography of Robert Burns.
Alan Bold married an art teacher, Alice; they had a daughter, Valentina, who is now head of Scottish Studies at the University of Glasgow at Dumfries. A lifelong heavy drinker who dealt with the boozy life of the poet in such collections as A Pint of Bitter, Bold suffered a heart attack in early 1998 and died in a hospital in Kirkcaldy at the age of 54.
Famous quotes containing the word bold:
“These battles sound incredible to us. I think that posterity will doubt if such things ever were,—if our bold ancestors who settled this land were not struggling rather with the forest shadows, and not with a copper-colored race of men. They were vapors, fever and ague of the unsettled woods. Now, only a few arrowheads are turned up by the plow. In the Pelasgic, the Etruscan, or the British story, there is nothing so shadowy and unreal.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)