After formal education at the University of St Andrews, Fergusson led a bohemian life in Edinburgh, the city of his birth, then at the height of intellectual and cultural ferment as part of the Scottish Enlightenment.

His parents, William and Elizabeth (née Forbes), were originally from Aberdeenshire, but had moved to the city two years previously and was working as a clerk in the British Linen Bank.

His father had died the previous year, his sister Barbara had married, and his older brother Harry had recently left Scotland, enlisting with the Royal Navy after a business failure.

Fergusson, who had rejected the church, medicine and law as career options open to him due to his university training, finally settled in Edinburgh as a copyist, the occupation of his father.

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.

Popular reception for his Scots work, as evidenced in a number of verse epistles in its praise,[7] 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.

[8] 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.

In late 1773, in his "Poem to the Memory of John Cunningham" which was written on hearing news of the death of that poet in an asylum in Newcastle, Fergusson expressed fears of a similar fate.

Fergusson is one of the sixteen Scottish poets and writers depicted on the lower section of the Scott Monument on Princes Street.

According to research carried out by Professor Gerard Carruthers, the portrait might have been the work by James Cummyng, a fellow Cape Club member.

Comparisons, such as between Fergusson's "The Farmer's Ingle" and Burns' "The Cotter's Saturday Night", often demonstrate the creative complexity of the influence.

The brutal circumstances of the poet's death prompted one of his visitors in Darien House, the young doctor Andrew Duncan (1744–1828), to pioneer better institutional practices for the treatment of mental health problems through the creation of what is today the Royal Edinburgh Hospital.

In 2023, a Leverhulme-Trust funded project 'The Collected Works of Robert Fergusson: Reconstructing Textual and Cultural Legacies' began at the University of Glasgow, led by Professor Rhona Brown.

This project has two aims: to produce a new scholarly edition of Fergusson’s works for the twenty-first century reader; and to commemorate the poet’s legacies through academic and collaborative events with external partners throughout 2024 (the 250th anniversary of his death) and 2025.