His most noted ballad, Lenore, found an audience beyond readers of the German language in an English and Russian adaptation and a French translation.

There he fell under the influence of Christian Adolph Klotz (1738–1771), who directed Bürger's attention to literature and encouraged his natural disposition to a wild and unregulated life.

In consequence of his dissipated habits, he was in 1767 recalled by his grandfather, but on promising to reform was in 1768 allowed to enter the University of Göttingen as a law student.

Meanwhile, he had made fair progress with his legal studies, and had the good fortune to form a close friendship with a number of young men of literary tastes.

[citation needed] In the Göttingen Musenalmanach, edited by Heinrich Christian Boie and Friedrich Wilhelm Gotter, Bürger's first poems were published, and by 1771 he had already become widely known as a poet.

[4][5][6] In 1774 he married Dorette Leonhart, the daughter of a Hanoverian official; but his passion for his wife's younger sister Auguste (the "Molly" of his poems and elegies) rendered the union unhappy and unsettled his life.

He still continued to teach in Göttingen; at the jubilee of the foundation of the university in 1787 he was made an honorary doctor of philosophy, and in 1789 was appointed extraordinary professor in that faculty, though without a stipend.

Deeply wounded by Schiller's criticism, in the 14th and 15th part of the Allgemeine Literaturzeitung of 1791, of the second edition of his poems, disappointed, wrecked in fortune and health, Bürger eked out a precarious existence as a teacher in Göttingen until, ill with tuberculosis, he died there on 8 June 1794.

Among his purely lyrical poems, but few have earned a lasting reputation; but mention may be made of Das Blümchen Wunderhold, Lied an den lieben Mond, and a few love songs.

[7] Bürger is known for German translations of Baron Munchausen’s narrative of his marvellous travels and campaigns in Russia by Rudolf Erich Raspe (1786, after the release of the 4th English edition; 2nd expanded ed.