An account of Alexander Wilson's early career, emigration, and poetry, focusing on his relationship to Burns and the similarities and contrasts with Burns's own career, revised from a review-essay originally published on Robert Burns Lives! in 2016; the article concludes by discussing and reprinting Wilson's poem about Burns, first published in a Philadelphia magazine in 1806, in response to the portrait of Burns engraved by another Scottish emigrant, Alexander Lawson, for the first American reprint of Currie's Life (Philadelphia, 1801).