SOURCE: "Notions of Poetry and Society in the Controversy about Ossian," in Homer's Original Genius: Eighteenth-Century Notions of the Early Greek Epic (1688-1798), Cambridge University Press, 1979, pp. 108-18.

In the following excerpt, Simonsuuri examines some of the literary and philosophical preconceptions that underlay the enormous popularity of Macpherson's Ossianic Poems in the eighteenth century.

The view that folk poetry and popular culture have an interest of their own and are worthy of serious attention gained acceptance during the middle years of the eighteenth century. Scholars hunted for genuine folk epics. They looked for evidence for the workings of the spontaneous genius of simple peoples, not only in the past productions of northern nations, but also in the earliest works of classical antiquity. The prevalent eagerness to find evidence for certain theoretical presuppositions about early stages of civilization, an eagerness most marked in Scotland, can partly explain the fact...