How did readers in Edinburgh react to Robert Burns’s Kilmarnock volume?

The success of Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect (the Kilmarnock volume) was immediate and overwhelming. Upon its publication in 1786, the work was hailed by both simple country folk and sophisticated critics in Edinburgh.1

This reception led Burns to travel to Edinburgh later that year, where he was lionized and patronized by the local literati. While contemporary reviewers particularly favored poems such as "The Cotter’s Saturday Night" and "To a Mountain Daisy," Burns’s arrival in the city ultimately subjected him to a social environment that he found unsettling, as he was forced to navigate the expectations of a genteel audience while maintaining his own creative instincts.12