Burns and Other Poets

This book features new essays on Burns' special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture.

The volume examines the innovative and technically accomplished nature of Burns's poetry. The all-new close readings of Burns 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.

Contributors include leading poet-critics such as Douglas Dunn and the award-winning Burns author Robert Crawford, experts in poetry criticism such as Stephen Gill and Patrick Crotty and two new poems written for the volume by Bernard O'Donoghue and Andrew McNeillie.

The creative-critical discussions here will generate new dialogues in Romanticism, Archipelagic Studies and Scottish, English and Irish literature.