Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect, commonly known as the Kilmarnock Edition, is a collection of poetry by the Scottish poet Robert Burns, first printed and issued by John Wilson of Kilmarnock on 31 July 1786. It was the first published edition of Burns' work. In mid-April 1786, Burns sent out printed Proposals for what was then titled Scotch Poems asking for people to sign up as subscribers, printing began on 13 June, and the first copies were ready for distribution by 31 July. 612 copies were printed. The book cost three shillings, in a temporary paper binding that most purchasers soon had replaced. There is no formal dedication at the start of the book, but Burns includes a dedication poem to Gavin Hamilton at pp. 185-191, and "The Cotter's Saturday Night" is "inscribed to R.A. Esq.," i.e. Robert Aitken.
Besides satire, the Kilmarnock volume contains a number of poems such as "Halloween" (written in 1785), "The Twa Dogs" and "The Cotter's Saturday Night", which are vividly descriptive of the Scots peasant life with which Burns was most familiar; and a group such as "Puir Mailie" and "To a Mouse", which, in the tenderness of their treatment of animals, revealed one of the most attractive sides of Burns' personality. In addition to the poems listed below under Contents, the book begins with a four-page preface in which Burns claims he lacks the benefits of "learned art," that none of his poems were written "with a view to the press," and that he "wrote a mid the toils and fatigues of a laborious life." It concludes with a five-page glossary (pp. 236-240), focusing on Scottish words current in Burns;s Ayrshire that might not be understood elsewhere in Scotland. Burns Other manuscripts are extant for many of the poems, but for six poems the manuscripts Burns gave to Wilson that Wilson used for the printer's copy are in the possession of the Irvine Burns Club.
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