Burns is famed as a Scottish cultural icon, the source of many phrases and sayings still in lively circulation; but his iconic familiarity has been of little service to critics. The broad brush of myth has only diverted attention from ambiguous and elusive elements in his writings, which often are my topic here. Burns wrote poems and (even more prolifically) songs, with the songs often transmitted anonymously. Critics have tended to focus on one or the other, leaving the relation between his poems and songs unstudied. A further barrier to seeing Burns in total is his literary language, an ever-shifting mixture of vernacular Scots and literary English. During the twentieth-century ascendancy of literary modernism, such influential arbiters as T. S. Eliot rejected Burns's hybrid diction, calling it incompatible with the broad traditions of British poetry. In the same era, specialists in Scottish studies generally preferred to focus on Burns's dialect-intense work, a different way of imposing language consistency on a writer committed to negotiating the distance between English and Scots. Another matter that invites further discussion is Burns's creative reconstruction of folk-collected lyrics.