Studies in Folk-Song and Popular PoetryWilliams, Alfred M. (Alfred Mason)
History
Studies in Folk-Song and Popular Poetry
Williams, Alfred M. (Alfred Mason)
Folk songs -- History and criticism
faulty or less natural than Chapman's transfusion of Homer into the
style of the Elizabethan era, or Pope's into that of Queen Anne. His
great drawback was the suspicion of absolute fraud and forgery which
attached to him, and which he was unable to dispel, from his mistake
in not acknowledging in the beginning that his poems were derived from
general tradition instead of being absolute translations from originals.
But in spite of this discredit, which was more of a personal literary
quarrel than a critical attack upon the quality of the poetry itself,
its value was at once instinctively recognized as a new and original
revelation, as an appeal to sensibilities in human nature which had
been stifled by the narrow and dry reasoning of English and Continental
poetry at the time, and as a breath from the wide air of nature itself.
It touched the European spirit, then struggling to emancipate itself
from the swaddling bands of authority and artificial society, with
electric power, and was a powerful influence in the emancipation both of
literature and human action. Ossian profoundly affected the intellectual
awakening of Goethe and was a favorite with Napoleon, and throughout
the whole of Europe its spirit was an inspiring and governing force.
In English literature its effect was not less powerful, although less
openly acknowledged owing to the discredit created by the charges of
forgery, and both Byron's melancholy and Wordsworth's appreciation of
the soul of nature were derived from this pervading spirit of ancient
Celtic poetry.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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