This book features new essays on Burns' special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture. This volume examines the innovative and technically accomplished nature of Burns' poetry. Close readings explore his dialogues with earlier poets such as John Milton, Thomas Gray, Allan Ramsay and Robert Fergusson and 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 how Burns drew on Scottish vernacular traditions, English poetry and 18th-century sentimentalism to create his own, new kind of poetry. The contributors include leading poet-critics Douglas Dunn and the award-winning Burns author Robert Crawford alongside experts in poetry criticism Stephen Gill and Patrick Crotty. It features two poems written especially for the volume by Bernard O'Donoghue and Andrew McNeillie.