page_title: Robert Fergusson
section_title: Literary career
hierarchical_section_title: Robert Fergusson / Literary career
caption_attribution_description: English: Rationale: the sculptor of this bust died &gt;70yrs ago Source: http://www-history.mcs.st-andrews.ac.uk/PictDisplay/Gregory_David.html
context_page_description: Robert Fergusson was a Scottish poet. After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish enlightenment. Many of his extant poems were printed from 1771 onwards in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine, and a collected works was first published early in 1773. Despite a short life, his career was highly influential, especially through its impact on Robert Burns. He wrote both Scottish English and the Scots language, and it is his vivid and masterly writing in the latter leid for which he is principally acclaimed.
context_section_description: There is good evidence that Fergusson had already been developing literary ambitions as a student at St Andrews where he claimed to have begun drafting a play on the life of William Wallace. His earliest extant poem, also written at this time, is a satirical elegy in Scots on the death of David Gregory, one of the university's professors of maths.
  Fergusson involved himself in Edinburgh's social and artistic circles mixing with musicians, actors, artists and booksellers who were also publishers. His friend, the theatre-manager William Woods, regularly procured him free admission to theatre productions and in mid-1769 Fergusson struck up a friendship with the Italian castrato singer Giusto Fernando Tenducci, who was touring with a production of Artaxerxes. Fergusson's literary debut came when Tenducci asked him to contribute Scots airs for the Edinburgh run of the opera. Fergusson supplied three, which were performed and published with the libretto.
  After February 1771 he began to contribute poems to Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Review. These at first were generally conventional English language works that were either satirical or fashionably pastoral in the manner of William Shenstone. His first Scots poem to be published (The Daft Days) appeared on 2 January 1772, and from that date on he submitted works in both languages.
  Popular reception for his Scots work, as evidenced in a number of verse epistles in its praise, helped persuade Ruddiman to publish a first general edition of his poems which appeared in early 1773 and sold around 500 copies, allowing Fergusson to clear a profit.
  In mid-1773 Fergusson attempted his own publication of Auld Reekie, now regarded as his masterpiece, a vivid verse portrait of his home city intended as the first part of a planned long poem. It demonstrated his ambition to further extend the range of his Scots writing. This also included an aspiration to make Scots translations of Virgil's Georgics, thus following in the footsteps of Gavin Douglas. However, if any drafts for such a project were made, none survive. The poet was a hard self-critic and is known latterly to have destroyed manuscripts of his writing.
caption: Mathematician David Gregory, subject of a "cheerful" satirical eulogy by Fergusson.
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