McIlvanney reveals Burns as a sophisticated political poet whose work draws on a range of intellectual resources: the democratic, contractarian ideology of Scottish Presbyterianism, the English and Irish ’Real Whig’ tradition, and the political theory of the Scottish Enlightenment. Throwing new light on the poet’s education and his early reading, McIlvanney provides detailed new readings of Burns’s major poems. The book also offers new research on Burns’s links with Irish poets and radicals, providing a radical reinterpretation of the man who is coming to be recognised as the poet laureate of the radical Enlightenment. |
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