Robert Fergusson

At 24 years old, Robert Fergusson physical status not available right now. We will update Robert Fergusson's height, weight, eye color, hair color, build, and measurements.

Robert Fersson (1750-1774) was a Scottish poet.

Fermson spent his childhood in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, and afterwards during a period of intellectual and cultural transition as part of Scotland's awakening.

Many of his extant poems were published in Walter Ruddiman's Weekly Magazine from 1771 to 1977, and a collection of his poems appeared in 1773.

Despite a brief life, his work was very influential, particularly because of Robert Burns' influence.

He wrote both Scottish English and Scots, and it is his vivid and masterly writing in the second leid for which he is most well known.

Life

Robert Fersson was born in Cap and Feather Close, a vennel off Edinburgh's Royal Mile, and later demolished to make way for the North Bridge's southern abutment. William and Elizabeth (née Forbes), both from Aberdeenshire, had immigrated to the city two years ago, but they had never lived there. He was the third of three children by them.

Fertson began formal training at the High School in the city and then the High School of Dundee. In September 1765, he attended the University of St Andrews with the help of a clan Fermson bursary. Robert Watson, a logic professor whose lectures dealt with English literature, taught rhetoric. He excelled at mathematics under William Wilkie's tutelage. Principal Thomas Tullideph (nicknamed "Pauly Tam") was set to expel Fermson because of his participation in a "student riot" but Prof. Wilkie warned him not to assist Wilkie in preparing lecture notes, but Ferry was dissatisfied by Fergusson's impending graduation (May 1768). Fergusson did not graduate, but it was not unusual and there was no shame. He kept his word and aided Prof Wilkie through the summer by writing the poem "Eclogue" to his memory later in life.

Fergusson returned to Edinburgh in the late summer of 1768. His father died within the previous year, his brother Harry had married, and his older brother Harry had recently left Scotland, enlisting with the Royal Navy after a business disaster. Fertson, who had not completed his studies, was presumably left with the help of their mother. After a quarrel, any chance of family help from his maternal uncle, John Forbes of Round Lichnot, near Auld Meldrum, stopped. Fergusson, who had rejected the church, medicine, and law as a career choice open to him due to his university education, has settled in Edinburgh as a copyist, which is the occupation of his father.

Source

Literary career

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.

Source