How can poems firmly attached to particular regions speak to readers far away? Why do writers turn to their own communities for materials? Local Attachments explores the literature of local attachment through the consideration of works by writers whose feeling for place is especially evident. Heaney, Burns, Wordsworth, Scott, Lamb and Dickens are key figures in the development of a new kind of literature that discovered universal meaning in local truth. The book’s starting point is Seamus Heaney’s Nobel Lecture, which is at once a celebration of local work in a global context and a passionate defence of the place of lyric poetry in modern society. The focus then shifts to the Romantic period, when such ideas became established in British and Irish culture, and explores both the presence of the local in literary texts by a wide range of writers and the cultural, philosophical and political contexts that might have contributed to this phenomenon. Wordsworth’s creative recovery in the Lake District is an exemplary case, illuminating both Heaney’s work and that of his immediate contemporaries and heirs. Wordsworth’s own project drew vital inspiration from the poetry of Burns and also found corroboration in the work Scott, so the book examines their independent explorations of the creative benefits - and problems attending - local attachment. The book concludes by addressing the continuing appeal of the local in modern, urban society and reaffirms the vital importance of poetry as a response to social crises.