The volume examines the innovative and technically accomplished nature of Burns’ poetry. The all-new close readings explore his dialogues with earlier poets such as John Milton, Thomas Gray, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson. These sit alongside analyses of the creative responses of his contemporaries and literary heirs including William Wordsworth, James Hogg, Thomas Dermody, Hugh MacDiarmid, George Mackay Brown, Don Paterson and Seamus Heaney. They demonstrate the ways in which Burns drew on Scottish vernacular traditions, English poetry and 18th-century sentimentalism to create a new kind of poetry.