“Do ye Sweep the Lyre?”: Romantic Resonances in The Poems of Ossian

Abstract

ABSTRACTJames Macpherson’s The Poems of Ossian establishes an elegiac bardic voice that emerges out of the Ossian poems and was especially inspirational for Romantic writers. Fragments of Ancient Poetry (1760) contains not only an epic bardic voice, but, more importantly, the echoing melancholic voice of the elegy. My reading of The Poems of Ossian as a polyphonic text in which the elegiac voices join the songs of the epic bard helps us to reimagine texts influenced by Ossian, and thus Romanticism itself, as a kind of resonant echo chamber in which elegiac mourners emerge and simultaneously speak to the past and to the future. I bring these readings to bear on a text directly responding to Anne Bannerman’s sonnet “From Ossian” (1807). By reading Ossian’s elegiac voice in the context of works which participate in the burgeoning Romantic tradition, I uncover an alternate literary history which embraces necessary fragmentation, a chorus of voices both alive and dead, a prophetic voice shrouded in uncertainty, and an ambivalent relationship with gender as integral to Romanticism writ large. Interpreting the powerfully hybrid elegiac voices in Ossian identifies a new lineage in Romanticism in which the elegy emerges as a dominant form. Notes1 This and all subsequent citations from The Poems of Ossian come from Howard Gaskill’s edition The Poems of Ossian and Related Works.2 Dafydd R. Moore compiles a complete list of contemporary debates surrounding the authenticity of The Poems of Ossian in Ossian and Ossianism (2004).3 JoEllen DeLucia argues for the particularity and importance of women writers in addressing Ossian because the Ossian poems “demonstrate the centrality of gender to the Scottish Enlightenment, and to establish the grounds for women writers’ engagement with the narratives of progress found in the literature and philosophy of Scottish literati” (21). Alongside her reading of the ways Macpherson challenges Adam Scott’s ideas about historiography, DeLucia gives a compelling reading of poet Catherine Talbot’s poems, in which her speaker adopts Ossian’s viewpoint. Talbot “theorize[s] women's ambivalent placement in progressive narratives of history and explore[s] the tension between imperial development and the refinement of social sentiments” (53). Katie Trumpener reads The Poems of Ossian as an important engagement with the figure of the bard: “controversies around the figure of the bard—and the problem of bardic memory—recapitulate at once the recurring epistemological dilemmas of antiquarian work and a specific history of debate about the politics of cultural memory and the future role of national cultures in the new multinational Britain” (xv). Fiona Stafford argues that Ossian, along with Gray’s poem “The Bard,” demonstrate an important cultural moment in which the figure of the last of the bards becomes significant for the ways in which it “suggests an antithetical need to grasp the fact of the past having passed. Indeed, the primitive ideal derived much of its power from the knowledge that it was doomed, the stature of the last bard being magnified by the imminence of the ending” (Last of the Race 93). Adam Potkay’s reading of eighteenth-century ideas of eloquence in the Age of Hume marks Ossian as “an ideal reconciliation of eighteenth-century oppositions: in him, the passionate fierceness of the citizen-warrior blends with the delicate affections fostered by domesticity; precommercial civic virtue joins with modern manners; the traditional attributes of masculinity combined with those of femininity” (Fate of Eloquence 206). Juliet Shields reads the Poems of Ossian for important cultural conversations about race and theories of racial difference: “The poems’ reconciliation of civilized feeling with primitive fortitude raised the question of whether sensibility was an innate trait or an acquired, historically contingent capacity, and consequently whether Britishness was an innate or an acquired identity” (Sentimental Literature 25). For a discussion on The Poems of Ossian's relationship with Jacobite politics, see Murray Pittock’s Poetry and Jacobite Politics in Eighteenth-century Britain and Ireland (1994).4 For a detailed reading of Goethe’s interactions with Machperson’s text, see Caitríona Ó Dochtraigh’s article.5 See especially DeLucia's A Feminine Enlightenment, Potkay’s The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume, and Silvia Sebastiani’s The Scottish Enlightenment.6 DeLucia explains: Both Ossian and his wife Evirallin sing together. Carril, the bard of Cuchullin, remembers in Fingal all three performing together in their youth … Evirallin is the “mildest” of women, yet she sings alongside Ossian of the constant death and battle of their rude age, paradoxically eliciting the tearful sentiments that belong to a more refined era. Many women appear in a similar capacity. (40)7 Eric Gidal’s Ossianic Unconformities lists the following major figures as direct inheritors of Ossianic ideas: Their mix of bombast, elegiac sentiment, and visionary hallucination helped shape a strain of romantic antiquarianism throughout the continent and beyond. Writers from Goethe and Schiller to Mme de Staël and Melchoire Cesarotti acclaimed Ossian’s poems as rivaling those of Homer for sublimity of thought and dignity of expression, and leaders as diverse as Thomas Jefferson and Napoleon Buonaparte claimed him as their inspiration. (3)8 An interesting companion to this conversation is Felicity Rosslyn’s defense of Pope’s use of heroic couplets in his translations in her essay “Heroic Couplet Translation: A Unique Solution?” Rosslyn argues for the strengths of the heroic couplet form, and she also makes a compelling reading of the ways in which translation of classical poetry always involves conversation between translators.9 Moore also argues that, along with dialing up the sentimentalism, in versifications of Ossian, “[A]s we might expect, sentimental tableaux rank highly, but so do stories with strong female characters” (“The Reception of the Poems” 36).10 Craciun explains the dubious nature of citation in Scott and Leyden’s collections of these ballads: “The more democratic title of ‘Border Ballads’ would accommodate the ballads’ collective and largely feminine mode of transmission and creation, though Scott’s antiquarianism (like his novels) intended to avoid precisely such a democratizing effect” (“Romantic Spinstrelsy” 207).11 In “Introduction: ‘genuine Poetry,'” Gaskill makes the connection between “the genuine lyrical beauty Macpherson is capable of achieving” (7) and “the lyrical apostrophes to various heavenly bodies,” which are Macpherson’s “most striking innovations” (7) in terms of his influence on Romanticism.