The editor of the third volume of the recent Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets anthologies, Tim Burke, writes in the introduction to his selection of Wilson's poems that the latter was “the most successful of the many Scottish labouring-class poets who flourished in the years following the dramatic rise to fame of Robert Burns” (Eighteenth-Century English Labouring-Class Poets, vol. III: 1780-1800, ed. Tim Burke, gen. ed. John Goodridge, 2003, p.179). In 1876 Alexander Grosart argued that this success endured long after Wilson's death, asserting that
… with the exception of Allan Ramsay, Fergusson, and Burns, none of our Scottish vernacular poets has been so …
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