The thread on Robert Service has prompted me into starting this new topic on another poet who I feel deserves a lot more recognition than he gets.
There are obviously a good number of Burns fans on the forum. Burns has become Scotland’s best known and most admired poet.
What about his immediate predecessor Robert Fergusson? Burns himself admitted that he owed him a great deal for his inspiration to the extent of having a headstone erected on Fergusson’s unmarked grave in the Canongate Cemetery in Edinburgh. There are also respectful references to Fergusson throughout Burns’s poetry. His whole philosophy and ethos are similar to Burns.
I myself “discovered” Fergusson a few years back through his poem “The Farmer’s Ingle” which was the obvious inspiration for Burns’s “The Cottar’s Saturday Night”, and when I delved into his poetry and life story I realised that there was more to him than just his best known poem. Yet he has been almost forgotten about.
He lived from 1750 till 1774, making him just 24 years of age when he died, but in that time he wrote enough to establish himself as one of the greatest Scottish poets of his time, or any time. He was 9 years of age when Burns was born, and when he died Burns was only 15.
Check out these websites:
http://uk.geocities.com/rfsociety2003/
http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/~www_se/fer ... index.html
If you like Burns, you’ll like this.
