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

Abstract

ABSTRACT James 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.