Hence the importance of folk poetry folk traditions and ancestral voices.B eneath the rationa culture of enlightenment the Romantic searched for another and deeper culture the culture of the people rooted in mystery, and surviving in the inner sanctuary of the poet's self. It is appropriate that the first attempt to folk' culture was a fabrication, recognised as such by that great champion of the classical spirit, Dr Johnson. Macpherson's Poems of Ossian purported to be translated from a Gaelic original, in fact it invented a lost community of heroes, in which na ture and man were in harmony, in which human life was idealised and and in which the burden of freedom was happily put down The Scottish Border ballads, Herder's anthol of folk poetry, von Arnim and Brentano's Das Knaben Wunderhorn all such collections were put together as much from bourgeois d and as ditions.