SOURCE: "Poet: Kilmarnock Edition," in Robert Burns: The Man and the Poet; A Round, Unvarnished Account, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1970, pp. 107–23.

In this excerpt, Fitzhugh discusses several poems included in Burns's 1786 collection, Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect.

Poems Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, by Robert Burns, Kilmarnock, 1786, was a well-printed paper-bound volume of 240 pages, priced at three shillings. Burns and his friends had gathered over 300 subscriptions, enough to defray expenses, before printing began. In his original proposal to his subscribers, Burns had offered only Scotch poems, but he finally included half a dozen melancholy and moralizing English pieces apparently to increase the volume's appeal. And, it should be noted, although the subscribers and the presumed audience were to be almost entirely local, or at least Scottish, Burns added a liberal glossary of his Scots vocabulary. The 612 copies brought in £90, of which the printer's bill took £34/3/—; but Burns says...