The Edinburgh poet Robert Fergusson had a short and tragic life, but his poetry is full of joy, humour and vivacity. He is known today for the tragic circumstances of his death and for his profound influence on Scotland’s national poet, Robert Burns, but there is so much more to Fergusson than this.

He began his professional literary career in his late teens, writing songs for operas which were performed in Edinburgh’s theatres. He continued from 1771 until his death as a ‘house poet’ for Walter Ruddiman’s periodical, The Weekly Magazine, or Edinburgh Amusement, where his works were very regularly found in the poetry section. He published a collection, Poems, in 1773, but his long poem, Auld Reikie (also 1773), is his magnum opus. This poem, which focuses on the everyday life of the ordinary inhabitants of eighteenth-century Edinburgh, is dazzled by the city’s beauty, but refuses to shy away from its dark corners, and its more gruesome and depraved aspects.

Fergusson died at the age of twenty-four in Edinburgh’s Bedlam asylum after a brain injury caused by a fall. Despite his short career, Burns described him as ‘my elder brother in misfortune, / By far my elder brother in the muse.’

This resource is based on the exhibition held at the Mitchell Library, Glasgow, from September to November 2024, to commemorate the 250^th anniversary of Fergusson’s death. A collaboration between the Mitchell Library and ‘The Collected Works of Robert Fergusson: Reconstructing Textual and Cultural Legacies’, a Leverhulme Trust-funded project at the University of Glasgow, this online exhibition is designed to celebrate the life, works and legacies of Robert Fergusson, one of Scotland’s most important, talented and catalysing poets.