Macpherson, James. (1736 - 1796).
W o r k
- pretended to have discovered and translated the works of the 3rd century Scottish Gaelic poet ‘Ossian, the son of Fingal’
> contributed to the widely received Romantic image of the primitive poet
Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760):
- supposedly a translation of poetry from Scottish Gaelic
- based on the manuscripts he claimed to have discovered in the Highlands and Islands
Fingal: An Ancient Epic Poem in Six Books (1762):
- supposedly a translation of an epic by the bard Ossian
- some Gaelic ballad poetry is truly attributed to one ‘Oisean’, son of the warrior Fionn x but: cleverly adapted, re-created, and expanded mere fragments of surviving verse
- compounded stories belonging to different cycles to give a Homeric coherence and classical solemnity to the disparate ballad accounts of ancient Scottish feuds
- employed the musical measured prose used in his earlier volume
- appreciated natural beauty and the emotive associations of wild landscape
- treated the ancient primitive heroism with a melancholy tenderness
> influenced Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schiller, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, and others (Goethe even incorporated his translation of a part of the work into his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther)
Temora: An Ancient Epic Poem in Eight Books (1763):
- another epic, in a similar vein as the former
Quote
"Star of descending night! fair is thy light in the west! thou liftest thy unshorn head from thy cloud; thy steps are stately on thy hill. What dost thou behold in the plain?"
From "The Songs of Selma" in Fingal (1762).
Basics
(Sketch: Wikimedia Commons).
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Author
James Macpherson (1736 - 1796). Scottish. -
Work
Poet. Forger of the Ossianic poems. -
Genre
Pre-Romanticism. Historicism.
Literature
Abrams, Meyer Howard, ed. The Norton Anthology of English Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 1993.
Barnard, Robert. Stručné dějiny anglické literatury. Praha: Brána, 1997.
Baugh, Albert C. ed. A Literary History of England. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1967.
Coote, Stephen. The Penguin Short History of English Literature. London: Penguin, 1993.
Sampson, George. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1946.
Sanders, Andrew. The Short Oxford History of English Literature. New York: Clarendon Press, 1994.