NO ONE EVER TALKS ABOUT OSSIAN AND IT DRIVES ME INSANE. This is the wildest story in poetic history:

In the 1760’s, the Scottish poet James Macpherson (1736-1796) claimed to have discovered and translated poetry by the legendary Celtic bard, Ossian. Macpherson’s “translations” of two of Ossian’s epic poems, Fingal and Temora, took the entire Western world by storm. Many said, after reading Macpherson’s renditions, that Ossian eclipsed even Homer. For many others, the two were neck and neck: the twin pillars of ancient epic poetry. By the late 18th century, it was taken for granted that Ossian was one of the chief poets of Western civilization: he was the favorite poet of Napoleon, admired by Diderot and Goethe, and Thomas Jefferson called him “the greatest poet who ever existed.” Countless works of art were inspired by the Ossianic poems, and if you know someone named Oscar or Fiona (Hi Fiona Spring Leggett!) that too is a legacy of their popularity. Moreover, without the misty magic and atmospheric emotion of Ossian, the incipient Romantic movement would be unrecognizable.

The wee problem of course was that the Ossianic poems were, as the singularly contemptuous Samuel Johnson suspected, actually a complete fabrication by Macpherson himself. By the 19th century, as the evidence for the hoax gradually became stronger and stronger, Ossian began to be quietly erased from the canon, and now, the Ossianic poems are hardly ever read. This is a great shame, as it seems clear to me that what we actually have on our hands is possibly the most incredible phenomenon in poetic history. 

Nowadays we can smugly (and correctly) say that Macpherson is no Homer, but the fact that a bewigged 18th century poet could cosplay as an ancient bard and not only be believed, but be believed to be one of the greatest poets in human history, is utterly remarkable. Macpherson’s success story completely gives the lie to the idea that one must write in accordance with one’s age, and it should inspire us to pursue whatever way of writing most answers to the call of our muse. The Ossian poems are not only mythopoetic in subject matter, but utterly mythopoetic in conception: the vision of a single man who wanted to conjure an entire cultural universe. While poets should not intentionally deceive the public, the story of Ossian shows the triumph of fiction in multiple ways, and demonstrates that, with a little reframing, all sorts of writing are always possible.