Premise - the pleasure Romantic poems take in projecting historical difference onto the inanimate world is related to the pleasure of seeing (or imagining that one sees) a ghost.
Romantic-era representations of history often depend on a special
sense that sees or hears historical depth in the inanimate world.
Hear in distant winds as “ghostly language of the ancient earth.”
Heman’s ‘voices of the wind’ is premised on the conceit that the wind carries the sound of vanished civilizations which merge into a single hollow note as they echo down “the dark aisles of a thousand years”
Earthly immortality:
constituent parts of human consciousness will survive in the physical realm, just as the body’s constituent powers and particles live on inside a worm or a leaf.
Celts thought that the souls of the death were material, and consequently susceptible of pain.
By naturalizing the afterlife - moving it out of the graveyard and into the “roaring winds” - Macpherson echoes a project that was becoming central to philosophic thought in the 1760s: an attempt to rob death of its terrors by focusing on its continuity with the natural processes of life.
J H Remy’s reply:
Instead of mourning the dead in graveyards, we should visit them in libraries. Death has no power over man now that we have discovered “the secret of painting thought.” No one truly dies; instead the planet grows enlarged by the written contributions of the dead, whose qualities of mind thereby survive in succeeding generations. Past civilizations have no ceased to exist, they have simply changed latitude. Ancient towns rise up next to modern ones, and Paris has to expand to make room for a swelling population of ghosts.
complex wishful thinking about a secular afterlife… invent ghosts of that are simultaneously natural forces, shadows of other times, and representations of collective destiny.
To bind social energy would be to destroy it. Meanwhile, in exchange for acknowledging the social construction of textual agency, we are promised the right to participate in the refiguration of the text and thus become part of the process by which lost life forever lives on.