ABSTRACT
Moreover anticipations of the Romantic reaction against the predominant tastes of eighteenth-century culture were not confined to the last quarter of the century. The passion for the primitive in the ‘Ossianic’ literature is closely related to the taste for the archaic in Mrs Radcliffe and Keats. There was an enthusiast for genuine archaism in Dr Johnson’s own circle: Bishop Thomas Percy issued his Reliques of Ancient English Poetry in 1765. The Ossianic poems influenced him and so too did the revived interest in the ballad, but his innovations in the use of rhythms and symbolism separate him sharply from the central eighteenth-century literary tradition. Of course Blake’s oppositions between the native goodness of man and the corruptions of society, between the full range of imaginative and emotional expressiveness and the inhibiting effects of the rational and the institutional, intensify familiar late eighteenth-century drifts towards the cultivation of sensibility and feeling.
