Focuses on Robert Burns's achievements as a poet and his special place in Scottish, English and Irish literary culture since the 18th century. Contributors include leading poet-critics such as award-winning Burns author Robert Crawford & Douglas Dunn,

Whether male or female, loyalist or radical, urban or rural, literati or autodidacts, Scottish Lowland poets in the age of Burns adamantly refuse to imagine a single British nation. Instead, they pose the question of "Scotland" as a revolutionary category, always subject to creative destruction and reformation.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1864.