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Anna Karenina vocabulary
488 vocabulary words, including people, places, music, artists, etc.
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Ossian
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synonyms: Oisin ???
tags: [poet]
► definition
Definition:The ostensible narrater of poems published by James Macpherson between 1760 and 1765. In their day the poems were simultaneoulsy very popular yet very controversial w.r.t. their authenticity. Fans included Napoleon, Thomas Jefferson and Diderot.The characters in the poems occasionally accidentally murder their own lovers, as in the snippet below.
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Uses:
her hair loose behind, her bow in her
hand. She followed the youth to the
war, Connal her much beloved. She
drew the string on Dargo; but erring
pierced her Connal. He falls like an
oak on the plain; like a rock from the
shaggy hill. What shall she do, hapless
maid!—He bleeds; her Connal dies.
-Ossian
James Macpherson. Fragments of Ancient Poetry.
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The poems of Ossian are in every mouth—A famous antiquarian of this country, the laird of Macfarlane, at whose house we dined a few days ago, can repeat them all in the original Gallick,
Tobias Smollett. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771)
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Johnson is cited as calling the story of Ossian "as gross an imposition as ever the world was troubled with". In support of his claim, Johnson also called Gaelic the rude speech of a barbarous people, and said there were no manuscripts in it more than 100 years old.
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A month later, the Gentleman's Magazine (LII [September 1782], 439), "reciting the circumstance" of the origin of the Deformities, contended that it was a revenge pamphlet inspired by an anti-Ossian publication by William Shaw ("Nadir" Shaw, in the Deformities), who "'denied the existence of Gaelic poetry....'" "Dr. Johnson was his patron;J.T. Callender. Deformities of Dr Samuel Johnson. (1782)
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"Yes, my boy, there is! There, do you see, you know the type of Ossian’s women.... Women, such as one sees in dreams.... Well, these women are sometimes to be met in reality ... and these women are terrible. Woman, don’t you know, is such a subject that however much you study it, it’s always perfectly new."
Leo Tolstoy. Anna Karenina.
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