Professor Borges - A Course on English Literature

of Macpherson’s style have been observed. So, let these two illustrious and different admirers suffice. 13
    In England, on the contrary, the reaction was a bit different, or totally different, because of Dr. Johnson. Dr. Johnson despised and hated the Scots, even though his biographer, JamesBoswell, was Scottish. Johnson was a man of classical tastes, and the idea that around the sixth or seventh century, Scotland had produced a long epic poem must have greatly disturbed him. Moreover, surely Johnson felt the threat this new work—so full of the romantic movement—entailed to the classical literature he worshipped. Boswell wrote down a conversation between Johnson and Dr. Blair.Blair told him that there was no doubt about the antiquity of the text, and he asked him if he thought any man of a modern age could have written such poems. Johnson replied, “Yes, Sir, any man, many women, and many children.” Johnson also put forth an argument that was no less grave. He argued that as Macpherson had said the poem was a literal translation of ancient manuscripts, he should show those manuscripts.
    According to some of Macpherson’s biographers, he did try to acquire and publish them in some way. The polemic betweenJohnson and Macpherson became more and more heated. Macpherson finally published a book to prove the similarities between his poem and the texts. Be that as it may, Macpherson was accused of being a forger. Undoubtedly, if this had not happened, we would not see him today as a great poet. Macpherson spent the rest of his life promising to publish the manuscripts. He reached a point that he proposed publishing the originals, but in Greek, and this was, of course, a way of trying to gain time.
    Today, we are not interested in whether the poem is apocryphal or not, but in the fact that it foreshadows the romantic movement. There is a polemic between Johnson and Macpherson that is still relevant, a rather lengthy exchange of correspondence between them. But in spite of Johnson, Macpherson’s style—the style of Macpherson’s Ossian—spread throughout Europe, and with it, the romantic movement was inaugurated; with it, the romantic movement is born. In England, we have a poet,Gray, who writes an elegy dedicated to the anonymous dead in a cemetery. We find in Gray’s
Reliques of Ancient Poetry
the melancholic tone of romanticism. 14 It includes translations of Scottish romances and ballads, and an extensive preface that asserts the fact that poetry is the work of the people. This work by BishopPercy is important for its intrinsic value and because it inspiredHerder’s book,
Voices of the People
, which contains not only songs of Scotland but also German
Lieder
, traditional ballads, etcetera. 15 With this book, the search for “the peoples’” creations spread to Germany.
    We can see that without Macpherson and these elegies of Bishop Percy, the romantic movement would have arisen—it was almost historical, we could say—but with quite different characteristics. We should remark that nobody considered that the romantic movement had anything to do with Macpherson, or that he, as the author of
Fingal
, showed remarkable originality. The versification he uses is a rhythmic prose never before used in any original work. So, for this fact alone we can consider him a precursor ofWhitman and so many writers who have worked in free verse. Never could
Leaves of Grass
have been written, in the style Whitman employed, without the highly original work of Macpherson.
    If there is one noble feature that we should keep in mind when we judge Macpherson, it is that he never wished to be considered a poet; what he wanted was to sacrifice himself for the greater glory of Scotland, for which he gave up fame and rejected the title of poet. We also know that he wrote a great amount of poetry and destroyed it when he realized that they were similar to the Scottish bards, without being theirs. So, he also renounced his own creations.
    In the next class we will see how romanticism developed, now, in another country, England.

CLASS 12

    LIFE OF WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. THE PRELUDE AND OTHER POEMS.

    MONDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1966
    Wordsworth was born in [Cockermouth], Cumberland, in 1770, and died as England’s poet laureate in 1850. He comes from the family Lonsdale, which means “people of the border,” a family that had been toughened through wars with the Scots and the Danes.
    He studied at the local grammar school, then at