The paper reviews three works by the Kolomna-based literary historian A. Kulagin, a specialist in Russian classical and modern poetry, and a leading researcher of theory and history of songs written and performed by authors. A.Kulagin’s strategy as a scholar is to study Russian poetry as an indivisible spiritual and aesthetic system, and reveal inner connections and mutual references in works by different poets. He researches the traditional sources of Pushkin’s poetry and Pushkin motifs in poems by Brodsky, Vysotsky, Galich, Kushner, and Okudzhava. His is the first comprehensive study of the traditional context of Aleksandr Kushner’s poetry. A. Kulagin’s interpretation of songs written and performed by authors shows the genre as organically woven into the fabric of Russian poetry, with a compelling example in the book on Gennady Shpalikov. Here we have a manifestation of a typical trend in modern literary studies: transition from individual poetic legacy to solving the mystery of the poet’s personality.