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Robert Burns wrote of Robert Fergusson - 'My elder brother in misfortune, By far my elder brother in the muse.'
When Burns first arrived in Edinburgh in 1787,
after two days pony ride, he went to find Fergusson's grave in the Canongate graveyard
and he found there was no grave for his poetic mentor and so he paid what money
he had to lay a commemorative stone of his own design on his grave. When Burns first read Fergusson’s poems in
the Scots dialect, he realised that he too might write in this way.
In a recent TV documentary author Andrew O'Hagan
said that - ' without Burns we might never have known about Robert Fergusson and without
Fergusson there might never have been our national bard Robert Burns.'
Unlike
Burns, Fergusson was well connected and highly educated. Fergusson was tutored at home and at fourteen he gained
a bursary to a Dundee Grammar school. After which Fergusson attended St Andrews university
to study Maths and Philosophy. Scotland believed in offering all a good education as a route out of poverty and so boys could read and interpret the Bible.
When he returned to Edinburgh, at the height of the
Scottish Enlightenment, he worked as a legal copyist and he was part of the
literary circle in Edinburgh called the Cape Club. He began to write poems about the Edinburgh people
and he wrote some poems in the Scottish dialect. He had poems published in Walter Ruddiman's
Weekly Review. His masterpiece is a poem entitled Auld Reekie.
He had his one poetry book published in 1773. Then
his poems stopped and after he had a fall he was committed. Shortly after he
died at the young age of 24.
Fergusson is one of 16 poets depicted on the Scott
Monument and he appears beside Robert Burns.
Several of Burn's work has traces of the impact of Fergusson's work -
'Leith Races' was a model for Burn's 'Holy Fair'; 'On Seeing a Butterfly' has
similarities to 'To a Mouse'.
