1. James Macpherson (1738–96). This writer was born at Kingussie, in the county of Inverness, and was educated for the Church. He never became a regular minister, for at the age of twenty he was producing bad poetry, and soon after he definitely adopted a literary career. He traveled in the Highlands of Scotland and abroad, settled in London (1764), and meddled in the politics of the time. Then he entered Parliament, realized a handsome fortune, and died in his native parish.
After producing some worthless verse in the conventional fashion, in 1760 he issued something very different. It was called Fragments of Ancient Poetry translated from the Gaelic. The work received a large share of attention, and a subscription was raised to allow him to travel in the Highlands to glean further specimens of native poetry. The fruits of this were seen in Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763). Macpherson declared that the books were his translations of the poems of an ancient Celtic bard called Ossian. Immediately a violent dispute broke out, many people (including Johnson) alleging that the books were the original compositions of Macpherson himself. The truth is that he gave substance to a large mass of misty Gaelic tradition, and cast the stories into his peculiar prose style.
The controversy hardly matters to us here. What matters is that the tales deal largely with the romantic adventures of a mythical hero called Fingal. They include striking descriptions of wild nature, and they are cast in a rhythmic and melodious prose that is meant to reproduce the original Gaelic poetical measure. As an essay in the Romantic method these works are of very high value. (See p. [349].)
2. Thomas Chatterton (1752–70). Chatterton was born at Bristol, and was apprenticed to an attorney. At the age of eighteen he went to London to seek his fortune as a poet. Almost at once he lapsed into penury, and, being too proud to beg, poisoned himself with arsenic. He was eighteen years old.
The brevity and pathos of Chatterton’s career have invested it with a fame peculiar in our literature. He is held up as the martyr of genius, sacrificed by the callousness of the public. His fate, however, was largely due to his own vanity and recklessness, and his genius has perhaps been overrated. In 1768, while still at Bristol, he issued a collection of poems which seemed archaic in style and spelling. These, he said, he had found in an ancient chest lodged in a church in Bristol; and he further stated that most of them had been written by a monk of the fifteenth century, by name Thomas Rowley. The collection received the name of The Rowley Poems, and includes several ballads, one of which is The Battle of Hastings, and some descriptive and lyrical pieces, such as Songs to Ælla. A slight knowledge of Middle English reveals that they are forgeries thinly disguised with antique spelling and phraseology; but, especially after their author’s death, they gained much currency, and had some influence on their time. There is much rubbish in the poems, but in detached passages there is real beauty, along with a marvelous precocity of thought.
3. William Blake (1757–1827). Blake was a Londoner, being born the son of a City hosier. At the age of ten he was an artist; at the age of twelve he was a poet; and thereafter his father apprenticed him to an engraver. All his life Blake saw visions and dreamed dreams, hovering on the brink of insanity; and his mental peculiarities are abundantly revealed in the two arts that he made his own. His engravings and his poems, conceived on wild and fantastic lines, kept him fully occupied all his life, though they brought him neither money nor fame. But his desires were easily satisfied, and he died poor and unknown, but cheerful and serene, in the city of his birth.
His chief poetical works are Poetical Sketches (1783), Songs of Innocence (1789), and Songs of Experience (1794). They are extraordinary compositions, full of unearthly visions, charming simplicity, and baffling obscurity. His genius is undoubted, but it is wayward and fitful, the sport of his unbalanced mind. His astonishing lines on the tiger are well known, and are a good specimen of his poetical gifts:
Tiger, tiger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye