Primarily remembered as a poet nicknamed Potato Willie, known more respectfully as the "Scottish Homer", he contributed to Scotland's 18th Century Vernacular Revival.
He was educated at Dalmeny parish school and then studied at the University of Edinburgh, having among his college contemporaries John Home, David Hume, William Robertson, and Adam Smith.
On 17 May 1753 he was appointed under the patronage of the Earl of Lauderdale as assistant to Rev John Guthrie, parish minister of Ratho, Midlothian, on whose death in February 1756 he became sole incumbent.
This edition gained warm praise for The Epigoniad from David Hume, in a letter to The Critical Review, complaining that the journal had unduly depreciated the poem when first published.
He gains a mention from a character in Tobias Smollett's epistolary novel The Expedition of Humphry Clinker as one of Scotland's "many authors of the first distinction... as agreeable in conversation as they are instructive and entertaining in their writings.
"[3] In 1768 Wilkie published a small volume of 16 fables in iambic tetrameter reminiscent of John Gay, with a "Dialogue between the Author and a Friend" in heroics.