  What remains unclear, however, is just what Herder means by “force” here. He only hints at what he might mean a few pages later when he says that “the essence of poetry” is “the force, which adheres to the inner in words, the magical force, which works on my soul through fantasy and recollection” (“First Grove,” p. 197). The force unique to poetry seems to be precisely its power to make us feel as if the objects and events it describes are real and thereby to engage our own emotions and passions more fully than the other arts can. But he may make clearer what he has in mind in his praise for the poetry of primitive peoples in a famous 1773 essay on what were later to be revealed to be the fraudulent poems of the fictional Scottish bard “Ossian.” This essay was included in a collection On German Style and Art that also included Herder’s equally famous essay on Shakespeare (to which we will return below) and a seminal essay by Goethe that revived interest in Gothic architecture. Here Herder declaims: