Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray continues to occupy a strange space in the canon. Some of his poems—always the Elegy, sometimes the Odes—hold fast or enjoy cyclical reappraisals, but Gray himself rarely looms large in visions of the mid-eighteenth century, unless that period in literary history is characterized, like Gray himself, as anxious, repressed, or feeble.¹ Wallace Jackson, writing for the Poetry Foundation, probably the most prominent online entry on Gray, announces that

Thomas Gray is generally considered the second most important poet of the eighteenth century (following the dominant figure of Alexander Pope) and the most disappointing. It was generally assumed by friends and readers that he was the most talented poet of his generation, but the relatively small and even reluctantly published body of his works has left generations of scholars puzzling over the reasons for his limited production and meditating on the general reclusiveness and timidity that characterized his life.²

Gray’s low profile is partly also a matter of genre: the rise of the novel—verbose, ebullient, multivocal, popular, and indeed enjoyed by Gray himself—tends to push the poets of mid-century into the margins of their own “age of sensibility,” the post-Augustan “flight from history” or the “preromantic” age.³ Gray is frequently bracketed with William Collins—another poet who wrote little (though he had the excuse, unlike Gray, of dying young and insane) and agonized over the direction of English poetry in his “benighted age.”⁴ Collins’s most famous poem, the “Ode on the Poetical Character,” was published in 1746. Its homage to Spenser and Milton, and its uncertainty as to who (if anyone) could inherit the “hallowed work” of inspired poetry (“Where is the bard, whose soul can now / Its high presuming hopes avow?”) clearly influenced Gray’s 1757 Pindaric “Odes” (“The Bard” and “The Progress of Poesy”), which likewise worry about “what daring spirit” might awake the “lyre divine.” The aural pun on “lyre” and “liar” here adds an extra layer of complexity to the problem.⁵ But the characterization of the mid-eighteenth-century poet as anxious, self-questioning, and melancholic, which dominated visions of the period in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries stems from a partial reading of Gray (and indeed of Collins), and from placing too much emphasis on passing remarks in Gray’s correspondence such as “the still small voice of Poetry was not made to be heard in a crowd.”⁶

Gray himself must shoulder some of the blame for his timid image: he was famously reluctant to publish, and several of his works were initially published only accidentally or to forestall unauthorized publication (most famously, the Elegy in 1751). In 1768, just three years before he died, Gray himself carefully oversaw the publication of his collected poems.⁷ Only ten poems were included: “Ode on the Spring,” “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,” “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Hymn to Adversity,” “The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode,” “The Bard: A Pindaric Ode,” “The Fatal Sisters: An Ode,” “The Descent of Odin: An Ode,” “The Triumphs of Owen: A Fragment,” and, finally, the “Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard.” Although the comic “A Long Story” had featured prominently in a previous edition (1753 Designs), Gray insisted on its exclusion in 1768 and offered the hitherto unpublished Norse & Welsh translations “to make up (in bulk) for the omission.”⁸ After Gray’s death in 1771, Mason’s 1775Memoirs and Poems restored other poems and included several translations and fragments within the texts of those letters that Mason chose to publish; however, the 1775 volume (like 1768) suppressed several of the satiric poems, and Mason seems also to have destroyed several more, thus going a long way to consolidate the image of Gray as the disappointed poet of sensibility.⁹ Mathias in his 1814 revision of Mason further suppressed the more playful and satiric works.¹⁰

The Gray known to the eighteenth-century reading public was thus far more limited than the Gray since made known through expanding editions of his poems, correspondence, fragments, translations, Latin poems (including some whimsical Latin verse captions to Linnaeus’s “Orders of Insects”), travel jottings, and miscellaneous scholarly writings, including his notes toward a History of English Poetry, reflections upon Italian music, and jottings upon cookery.¹¹ But whether we consider simply the poems published in his own lifetime or the full range of his work, both published and unpublished, we must admire the degree of Gray’s formal experimentation within a great variety of modes and genres. What his work lacks in volume it makes up for in complexity, suggestive of a fragmented self shoring itself up through energetic bursts of engagement with other texts and discourses.

Since the 1990s a steady stream of illuminating new publications has appeared on Gray, many of which have challenged or at least complicated his “disappointing” status. Attentiveness to his many unpublished and incomplete works has expanded our sense of Gray, whose oddities as a man and as an author have proved congenial to new critical approaches to the eighteenth century. Interest in Gray’s “certain degree of pride, which led him of all other things, to despise the idea of being thought an author professed”¹² has fueled important recent work on the broader problem of authorship in the eighteenth century. Suvir Kaul in 1992 contended that Gray wrote little poetry that is not “explicitly concerned with the figure of the poet,” and that his work as a whole and the Elegy in particular derives its mysterious emotional impact (its “unpurposive pity”) from the predicament of the high-cultural poet adrift in an increasingly commercialized society.¹³ Kaul’s broadly Marxist reading of Gray as a representative “gentleman poet” in crisis at a time of transition is a vigorous one, yet his vision of Gray as “the” mid-eighteenth-century poet ignores Gray’s literary and personal peculiarity. As Kaul himself notes, Walpole wrote to Mason that “I am neither ashamed of being an author, or a book seller…. I have no notion of Gray’s delicacy.”¹⁴

Linda Zionkowski has offered a more nuanced view of Gray’s authorial oddity, arguing that his work offers compelling evidence for the increasingly gendered nature of authorship in the eighteenth century, as writers began to “associate masculinity and cultural power with commercial success, while characterizing poets’ detachment from the market as an infantile, or effeminate, dependence upon others.”¹⁵ In this context, much of Gray’s work can be seen to articulate not only anxieties about authorship, but also repressed homosexual desire. Building on the pioneering essay by Jean Hagstrum in 1974, critics, including Raymond Bentman, George Haggerty, and Robert Gleckner, have not only offered important rereadings of the major poems, illuminating the various ways in which they encode the sadness of illicit desire, but have also opened the way for further reappraisals of the lesser known poems, especially the translations and the Latin poems (unpublished in Gray’s lifetime).¹⁶ The recent biography by Robert Mack is thoroughly attentive to Gray’s homosexuality and its complex textual resonances.¹⁷

If Gray’s most apparently personal works have attracted long-overdue and sympathetic attention in recent years, those later poems that seem least concerned with his own interior life, the 1757 “Odes” and his Welsh and Norse translations, have likewise received important reappraisals. Recent explorations of the “fringes” of British culture (or, indeed, reorientations of “Britain” so as to challenge the notion of “fringe”) have offered fresh contexts for Gray’s interest, in his later years, in the remote British past and in older oral modes of poetry that gesture toward the further reaches of empire. James Mulholland’s recent study of poetic voice and empire includes a substantial section on Gray’s later poems, which inspired a new generation of writers (including Welsh bards) to reimagine Britain’s literary history.¹⁸

Few if any of these studies have managed to grasp or explain Gray in the round, as it were. He remains an author whose works seem to fall into discrete categories. For instance, Robert Gleckner’s commitment to reading Gray’s works as centrally concerned with his repressed sexuality can find little to say of “the Norse and Welsh fiascos” beyond condemning (somewhat ungrammatically) their “absolute impenetrableness into Thomas Gray’s breathing, passionate self.”¹⁹

The following essay will, for practical purposes, acknowledge this tendency to fragmentation by addressing, in turn, the various subgroups within Gray’s oeuvre, while also teasing out some unifying threads. In particular, I hope to defamiliarize the poems and remind readers of what Martin Price has characterized as their “avant-garde” quality and to show how their mannered reticence hovers intriguingly between the camp and the tragic, making them both peculiar and universal.²⁰

The Elegy remains central to Gray’s critical reputation and cultural status, his one reliably anthologized poem in both British and American teaching anthologies and the only one of his works easily available for Kindle. It still speaks to that increasingly elusive figure, the common reader, flattering us with a sense that we are reading serious poetry without intimidating us with recondite allusions that must be recognized in order to make sense of the poem. In this respect, as I have noted elsewhere, the mode of the Elegy differs not only from Pope’s and Swift’s high “Augustan” use of allusion, which Martin Price has characterized as “complex, urbane, and deliberate,” but also from Gray’s own consciously challenging mode in the 1757 Odes.²¹ The Elegy proceeds more gently, its allusive mode almost “involuntary,” as Price explains: “The borrowings may be allusions, but often they are not. We need not trace them to a source. We recognize that the terms have had some earlier life in literature; they have an aura.”²² Early discussions of Gray often use metaphors of weaving or of mosaic-making. Isaac D’Israeli in 1796 describes his work as “a wonderful tissue, woven on the frames, and composed with the gold threads of others.” Less flatteringly, Carlyle in 1828 describes it as a “laborious mosaic,” while Leslie Stephen in 1892 admired Gray’s ability to “assimilate the phrases of his predecessors” into a seamless “tissue.”²³

Much of the Elegy’s appeal derives also from its naturalizing of existing poetic conventions. Even its form—quatrains of abab iambic pentameter—feels simultaneously fresh and traditional. Although the default setting for English verse at mid-century was still the rhyming couplet, Dryden’s Annus Mirabilis, the Year of Wonders, 1666 is a notable and similarly unusual precursor of the decasyllabic quatrain (a departure from Dryden’s own habitual use of the heroic couplet). Gray seems to be mounting an ironic challenge to the highly public and political mode of Dryden’s great work in situating his own poem in a country churchyard. Similarly, its interweaving of three poems in one (identified by Anne Williams as “a graveyard meditation, a reflection upon the universal desire to be remembered after death, and an elegy proper”) anchor it in existing and popular forms while creating a distinctively original hybrid, giving the Elegy a peculiarly concentrated feel.²⁴ Diction is likewise balanced between the Latinate and the more earthy Anglo-Saxon. In fact, the latter mode dominates the opening stanza, in which the peculiar Englishness of the landscape is evoked through ancient strategies, such as alliteration and assonance, and comes to rest with quiet emphasis on the personal pronoun:

The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (104)

Dustin Griffin has recently noted that the Elegy “manages to sound ‘English’ even when Gray is translating sentiments from classical or Italian writers…. When Gray’s diction is Latinate, it is often borrowed from Spenser, Milton, or Pope, from whom it acquires an ‘English’ feeling.”²⁵ The Elegy’s effortless “translation” of “classical literacy into an anthology of quotable vernacular phrases” made it a perfect poem for what John Guillory has described as the new “vernacular curriculum” of eighteenth-century bourgeois culture.²⁶ The Elegy’s ubiquity in schools and colleges in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries means that it continues to function as a hostage in critical debates over interpretation, value, and the canon.²⁷ Emphasis has shifted from the poem’s allegedly universal emotional appeal (encapsulated in Johnson’s declaration that it abounds with “sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo”) to its more troubling political assumptions and its epitaphic depiction of the melancholic youth.²⁸William Empson in 1935 first drew attention to the repressive politics that bolster the poem’s pastoral nostalgia: in particular, he complained about the reverent naturalizing of social hierarchy in this stanza:

Full many a gem of purest ray serene

The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:

Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,

And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (53–56)

Here, Empson argues, Gray by “comparing the social arrangement to Nature” makes it “seem inevitable, which it was not, and gives it a dignity which was undeserved.”²⁹

Recent queer readings of these same lines have shifted their focus onto sexual repression, with the flower image now suggestive of masturbatory loneliness as much as social unfulfillment (the faint echo of Shakespeare’s “waste of shame” seems an important pointer to the sexual theme here).³⁰ The nature of the speaker/protagonist’s “sensibility” has come under renewed scrutiny, as several critics have argued that the term was virtually code for “homosexuality” at this time, and that the Elegy’s speaker finds in the unrealized potential of the rustic dead an analogue for his own marginalized predicament. George Haggerty argues that the postures of “sensibility” and the new “man of feeling” of the mid-eighteenth century—generally seen by heterosexist critics and historians as means by which male sexuality was domesticated and feminized after the excesses of Restoration libertinage—in fact provided a new discursive framework for same-sex desire: “male-male desire is the open secret of sensibility” (83). Mason’s probable destruction of many of Gray’s letters to West is widely seen as evidence that their correspondence was not sufficiently coded, however—the secret was simply too open. We cannot know how many other documents Mason (sometimes with Walpole’s encouragement) destroyed. Some writings that he did publish, especially the undergraduate letters to Walpole, seem written in a doublespeak of student silliness and romantic ardor: Raymond Bentman finds their “rhetoric of romantic love” strikingly “unlike the language used by most contemporary writers in the letters that they wrote to other men.”³¹ In any case, Mason’s introductory memoir to Gray’s letters and poems in 1775 carefully pays tribute to “the sympathetic tenderness of his soul,” without using the term “sensibility.”³² In this light, Johnson’s famously disproportionate dislike of Gray—what Thomas Warton in his 1790 Life of Johnson referred to as his “strange aversion”—likely owes something to homophobia as well as politics, of a piece with Johnson’s “natural antipathy” to Walpole as “a Whig, the son of a Whig minister, effeminate and unmanly in his appearance, dainty and affected in his taste, a Cantabridgian, and a philosopher à la Voltaire.”³³ In Johnson’s world of manly clubbability, effeminacy was not only absurd, but also threatening to the ethos of homosociality.³⁴

In a way, then, the generalized melancholia of the Elegy, which makes it so congenial to so many readers, derives not merely from Gray’s specific grief at the loss of West (the “friend” of the epitaph) some fifteen years earlier, but also from the ongoing suppression of homosexual identity.³⁵ The anguish of repressed desire, refigured as “elegiac loss,”³⁶ generates an interpretative openness, and the predicament of the eighteenth-century male homosexual, ironically, becomes that of the universal human subject, as every bosom returns an echo to the generalized sentiments of melancholy isolation. The predicament of the social outcast, the “Other,” becomes the quintessential experience of the modern self, which derives a sense of embattled identity through its opposition to the unfeeling mass of society at large.³⁷

Such readings of the Elegy frequently depend upon or prompt similar interpretations of the 1742 poems, which have likewise enjoyed a resurgence of critical investigation from a queer perspective—not least because they were written during the most intense phase of Gray’s relationship with his Eton school friend Richard West (a relationship largely epistolary at this stage), just before West’s death on June 1, 1742. “Ode on the Spring,” a response to an “Ode on May” that West had sent to Gray, was written in early June, but before Gray had learned of West’s death from reading an obituary notice in the London Magazine on June 17. Several years later, Gray sent a copy of “Spring” to Walpole, through whom it found its anonymous way, in 1748, into Volume II of Dodsley’s A Collection of Poems … By Several Hands. The “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” was probably written in the months immediately following West’s death, and it was published by Dodsley as a sixpenny folio pamphlet in 1747 (the first of Gray’s poems to appear in print) before also being included in the Collection. The composition of the “Ode to Adversity,” which was retitled a “Hymn” for its publication in 1753, followed swiftly on from that of the Eton College Ode, and it arguably provides a “mature and positive confrontation of the evils of adult life that are described with such unrelieved gloom” in the Eton Ode.³⁸ The untitled poem first published by Mason in 1775 as the “Sonnet on the Death of Mr Richard West” was likewise written in the summer of 1742, and its intense expression of personal loss probably underlies Gray’s decision not to publish it.

“Spring” and “Eton” share a distinctive stanza form (though Eton has ten stanzas to Spring’s five): ten lines predominantly of iambic tetrameter but with trimeter at lines 2, 4, and 10, with a curiously infolded rhyme scheme (ababccdeed) that was unusual at this time and appropriate to the poems’ thematic concern with oddity, isolation, and melancholy. “Adversity” has six eight-line stanzas, each of iambic tetrameter save for the long eighth line, a brilliantly ponderous alexandrine to stress the stern value of Adversity in lines such as “And from her own she learned to melt at others’ woe” (16) and “Teach me … / What others are to feel, and know myself a man” (48). The rhyme scheme in each stanza narrows down into Augustan conformity (ababccdd), appropriate to the poem’s stoicism. Unlike the later Pindaric Odes, there is no tripartite structure, but otherwise these early poems certainly display what Paul Fry has identified as the general tendency of the ode toward “archaic extravagance”; a self-consciousness about its own daring that “flirts with parody” in order to preempt ridicule.³⁹

Flirting with parody has more than a touch of the camp about it, and much of Gray’s work—like the visual mannerisms of Walpole’s Strawberry Hill and the excesses of eighteenth-century Gothic—verges on the camp, as defined in 1964 by Susan Sontag and further historicized by Mark Booth in 1983. Camp is characterized by a “love of the unnatural: of artifice and exaggeration” that nevertheless seems to spring from “an irrepressible, a virtually uncontrolled sensibility”; it is also “something of a private code, a badge of identity, even, among small urban cliques.”⁴⁰ Both Sontag and Booth find the origins of camp in the rococo world of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, and the works of Pope, Congreve, Walpole, and Pergolesi (whose music, incidentally, was brought to Britain by Gray).⁴¹ Booth sees the “commitment to trivia” of The Rape of the Lock as a classic moment of camp, to which one might surely add Gray’s Cat “Ode.”⁴² Booth finds “the tendency to recreate an idealized version of the past” to be a classic symptom of camp, and in Gray’s work this impulse is twofold, in the poems’ nostalgia for classical or bygone English literary worlds and in the more emotional idealization of states such as innocence or childhood.⁴³ Stanza two of “Eton,” which echoes Dryden’s Aeneid and Gay’s Rural Sports, among other things, opens thus:

Ah, happy hills, ah, pleasing shade,

Ah, fields beloved in vain,

Where once my careless childhood strayed,

A stranger yet to pain! (lines 11–15)

Sontag insists that “Camp and tragedy are antitheses. There is seriousness in Camp (seriousness in the degree of the artist’s involvement) and, often, pathos…. But there is never, never tragedy.”⁴⁴ Arguably Gray proves her wrong. The unflinching depiction of physical and emotional suffering in “Eton,” and the glaring absence of any religious consolation (an absence intensified by the allusions to Paradise Lost), surely conjure a tragic vision of the world that awaits the “little victims” (line 52).

Robert Gleckner finds the 1742 poems united by an obsession with Milton and a deep sense of sexual guilt. He argues that Gray’s aspiration to Milton’s poetic achievement is frequently expressed in allusions either to Satan’s own ambitious folly or to those moments in Paradise Lost when Milton himself (in the invocations to Books 1, 3, 7, and 9) expresses the presumption of his project in terms that ally him with Satan. Hence, Gray’s poetic ambition is couched in terms of fallenness and shame, paralleling his consciousness of sexual trespass.⁴⁵ Gleckner’s reading of the Eton Ode may serve to exemplify his argument. He notes how Gray’s “strategic pillaging” ⁴⁶ of Milton constructs an affinity between the speaker addressing the “distant spires” of Eton with the Satan who in Paradise Lost first glimpses Paradise, like a traveler discovering “some renowned metropolis / With glistering spires and pinnacles adorned” (PL III, 549–550) and in Paradise Regained shows Christ the “golden spires” of the Temple (PR IV, 548).⁴⁷ And Gleckner also traces an allusion to Satan’s “ambush” of Eve in Book IX of Paradise Lost (“Such ambush hid among sweet flowers and shades,” IX, 408) in the “ambush” by the “murtherous band” that awaits the “little victims” of Eton (51–59) as they enter “the vale of years.”⁴⁸ The poem’s famous clinching platitude (“No more; where ignorance is bliss, / Tis folly to be wise,” 99–100) reminds us not only of Adam and Eve’s loss of innocence, but also of Satan’s foolish and contagious ambition. Gleckner’s valuable account reminds us of how much we stand to lose by losing touch with Gray’s sources: the dependence of the 1742 poems upon the reader’s recognition of ironic allusion doubtless contributes to their declining popularity today.

The “Sonnet” to West is a case in point, and in fact Wordsworth’s notorious denunciation of the poem’s artificial diction shows that even early readers could miss the point of Gray’s ironic allusiveness. Sonnets, notably outmoded in Gray’s era, were a Renaissance form associated with homoerotic desire as well as heterosexual passion. Additionally, Linda Zionkowski observes that lines 7–8 (“My lonely anguish melts no heart but mine; / And in my breast the imperfect joys expire”) also, rather startlingly, echo the complaint of the speakers of Restoration “imperfect enjoyment” poems.⁴⁹ In this context, the old debate initiated by Wordsworth (not a poet or critic known for his sensitivity to sexual nonconformity) over the mannered diction of the “Sonnet” takes on a new significance; Gray’s rehearsal of commonplace images and tropes is doubly ironic in light not only of West’s death, but also of the speaker’s own sense of utter exclusion from the world of nature and mankind, each of which is figured in cheerfully clichéd terms of sexual pleasure and productivity (the birds in “amorous descant,” men awakening to “new-born pleasure”). The closing depiction of the speaker’s mourning as “fruitless”—surely an echo of the closing lines of Paradise Lost Book IX, where the newly fallen Adam and Eve “in mutual accusation spent / The fruitless hours” (IX, 1187–8)—brilliantly fuses the sense of fallenness and homosexuality: “I fruitless mourn to him that cannot hear, / And weep the more because I weep in vain” (lines 13–14).

If Gray’s early published poems have their elusive mysteries, still more inaccessible, it would seem, are the Latin poems and translations; but these have, in fact, enjoyed a revival of recent critical interest, partly for what they reveal about the relationship with West, partly for the insights they offer into Gray’s vision of the bodily self in the world.

The surviving correspondence between Gray and West is dominated by their conversations about and translations of classical poets and their compositions of original poetry in Latin. As W. Hutchings has eloquently observed, “The language of the dead was Gray’s most intimate form of communication with his most intimate friend; until he wrote West a poem in English, only to find that West was dead.”⁵⁰ Several of these works enable Gray to encode his same-sex feelings for West within notably erotic classical antecedents. In May 1742, Gray sent West an original Latin “epistle” from Sophonisba, daughter of a Carthaginian general, to Massinissa, Prince of the Masaesylians.⁵¹ Gray’s own introduction to the poem carefully establishes the tragically doomed nature of their relationship, before Sophonisba proceeds to rebuke Massinissa’s failure to defend their marriage. Despite her anger, she dwells for many lines on the memory of his youthful beauty (“prima genas tenui signat vix flore iuventas”—“First manhood has hardly set its mark on your cheeks with its fine bloom”) and ends the epistle with a confession that his image has kept her awake all night.⁵² It is a powerful evocation of doomed sexual infatuation.

Similarly, the translation of Propertius’s Elegy II. i., which celebrates the raunchy attractions of Cynthia, is a barely veiled lovesong to West.⁵³ The poem’s closing lines (which rework the closing lines of West’s English poem of July 1737, “Ad Amicos”) have long been recognized as a precursor text to the Elegy, as the poet envisages the “sudden funeral” of “the lover” (lines 96–98) and also (somewhat egotistically) imagines his own death and pathetic “quiet urn” (105).⁵⁴ Gleckner pronounces the translation “an extraordinary poem,” and it certainly made Mason uneasy. As was his procedure with several other suggestive poems, Mason silently excised it from his 1775 printing of the letter in which Gray sent it to West (April 23, 1742), and Mathias in 1814 only partially restored it, omitting the first thirty lines that enumerate Cynthia’s erotic charms.⁵⁵

The shorter second part of De Principiis Cogitandi, probably written immediately after West’s death, is one of the better known of the Latin poems. It is a short coda to the long philosophical first part and describes the poet’s desolation at the death of his friend, which has brought to an end the poem’s exploration of “the secrets of Nature” (“Naturae arcana”).⁵⁶ The closing lines again echo West’s “Ad Amicos,” but with a heightened emphasis on the loneliness of the bereaved:

Respice, et has lacrimas, memori quas ictus amore

Fundo; quod possum, iuxta lugere sepulcrum

Dum iuvat, et mutae vana haec iactare favillae. (II. 27–29)

Translated thus:

look back on these tears, also, which, stricken with love, I pour out in memory of you; this is all I can do, while my only wish is to mourn at your tomb and address these empty words to your silent ashes.⁵⁷

These were the last significant lines Gray was to write in Latin: as Hutchings says, “With the death of West, Latin has become a dead language.”⁵⁸

Despite the desolation of Part II, the first part of De Principiis Cogitandi is alive with interest and is central to an understanding of Gray’s view of the self. S. H. Clark finds in Gray’s work as a whole (including the letters) a series of meditations on the Lockean self, but sees his “much neglected” De Principiis Cogitandi as “the epic of Lockean empiricism.”⁵⁹ David Fairer has recently identified a prevalent concern with Locke in earlier eighteenth-century poets, in particular the suggestion that “the mind might be … a highly sensitised response mechanism to qualities realisable only to itself”; and has also noted the “solipsistic (self-imprisoning) implications of Lockean perspective,” which many poets—including Gray—proceeded to question and explore. It is rewarding also, though, to explore not only the questions about “identity, memory, truth and reality” that Locke’s Essay had raised, but also its foundational emphasis upon the relationship between body and mind.⁶⁰

Locke’s model enables Gray to give sensuous heft to mental and emotional anguish, anticipating Keats’s physiological realization of psychic trauma.⁶¹ To this extent, as Clark argues, Gray is by no means a poet in retreat from history or at odds with his age; on the contrary, his works boldly embody the predicament of the Lockean self, apprehending consciousness at the intersection of mind and body.

The body in Gray’s work is perpetually assaulted by sensations, nowhere more explicitly than in De Principiis Cogitandi, in which, as Clark puts it, “perception is not access to the world: it is the world breaking in.”⁶² The assault is figured sexually, as the body is ravished by impressions:

Comminus interdum non ullo interprete per se

Nervorum invadunt teneras quatientia fibras,

Sensiferumque urgent ultro per viscera motum. (205–207)

Translated thus:

Meanwhile, with no intermediary, they [previously identified as “fragile particles, the seeds of things”] themselves attack at close quarters, battering on the delicate fibres of the nerves spontaneously, and driving the sense-carrying impulse throughout the vitals.

Life is a series of perceptions transmitted via the nerves. Sometimes the assault is pleasurable, even erotic:

At medias fauces, et linguae humentia templa

Gustus habet, qua se insinuet iucunda saporum

Luxuries, dona Autumni, Bacchique voluptas. (127–129)

Translated thus:

Taste holds sway between the jaws, the moist home of the tongue, where the pleasing profusion of flavours makes its way in, the gifts of autumn and the pleasure of Bacchus.

Cumulatively, though, the body’s continual assault by impressions, which become ideas, is traumatic:

Undique proporro sociis, quacunque patescit

Notitiae campus, mistae lasciva feruntur

Turba voluptatis comites, formaeque dolorum

Terribiles visu, et porta glomerantur in omni.

Nec vario minus introit magnum ingruit Illud,

Quo facere et fungi, quo res existere circum

Quamque sibi proprio cum corpore scimus, et ire

Ordine, perpetuoque per aevum flumine labi. (168–175)

Translated thus:

Moreover, on every side, wherever the field of awareness extends, the companions of diverse pleasures, an idle crowd, are borne along, and the forms of pain, terrible to behold, which darken every doorway. And by no less varied entrances that great power forces its way in, whereby we know that we act and are acted upon, and that objects exist around us, each with its individual form, and progress in due order, borne along on the endless stream through the ages.

The Lockean self is (to paraphrase Keats) convinced on its nerves that life is an endless succession of painful experiences.⁶³ Clark shows how the Eton Ode is concerned with the consequences of being a “Lockean self,” shaped by the mechanisms of memory and reason, retention and judgment, which, in the Eton Ode and elsewhere, produce “crisis and torment.”⁶⁴ The “forms of pain”—“formae dolorum”—in the passage from De Principiis Cogitandi have obvious affinities with the many terrifying personifications that populate Gray’s English poems, which are weighed down by the body and by the role of sensation in generating ideas and memory. Occasionally the body blazes forth in youthful beauty and enjoyment, but generally it is a site of painful realization.

The impulse to protect the physical self from injury—to resist its continual ravishment by the outside world, via the senses—finds voice in the Elegy’s concern with the corporeal fragility of the dead. The gravestones of the villagers are erected “these bones from insult to protect” (line 77). In other poems, Gray imagines his own death as a diminution of the body into the still smaller space of the urn (“my quiet urn” in the Propertius “Elegy II i,” and “mea urna” in the closing line of the Latin rendering of Petrarch Book I Sonnet 170). The protective urge extends also to Gray’s almost bodily anxieties about publication. James Mulholland notes that he “often imagined the literary marketplace as an assault: for instance, he refused an attempt by his publisher to print an engraving of his face in the 1753 Designs, writing grimly that he would not ‘suffer my Head to be printed’ as he thought it would be worse than the ‘Pillory.’”⁶⁵ Gray’s sense of physical vulnerability seems also at least in part to explain the almost compulsive textuality of his work, “the dense layering of allusion and syntax,” as a means of both protecting and isolating the self.⁶⁶ Even the tombstones of the villagers offer bodily protection through their “uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture” (line 79).

De Principiis Cogitandi was, of course, unknown to Gray’s contemporaries; yet, its focus on the bodily origins and realization of thought and emotion, which encourages us to explore that theme further within the English poems, found an uncanny visual echo in the 1753 publication of Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. The project was suggested and overseen by Walpole, for whom Bentley was working at the time on various design projects for Strawberry Hill, and the volume’s arch visual intricacies echo the rococo flourishes of Walpole’s architectural whimsy. Published by Robert Dodsley for half a guinea per copy, Designs “was an instant success and was followed by six other editions, the last of which appeared in 1789.”⁶⁷ Ralph Griffiths hailed it appreciatively in the Monthly Review:

We have now before us one of the most elegant publications that our country hath produced for some years past: whether we consider the beauty of the printing, the genius that appears in the designs for the cuts, or the masterly execution of most of the engravings. Nor will the connoisseur in prints, we are persuaded, think the price of this volume too high: whatever may be the judgment of the mere poetical purchaser, to whom it may appear somewhat rare to pay half a guinea for thirty-six pages of verse.⁶⁸

Of the six poems that Bentley illustrated, the “Odes” on the Spring, the drowned Cat, and Eton College, as well as the “Elegy” had been published before; “A Long Story” and the “Hymn to Adversity” were added. (Digital images of the volume are available on the Thomas Gray Archive, which may be accessed through this link). Each poem is prefaced with a full-page frontispiece on the facing verso and a half-page headpiece depicting a more specific “scene” from the poem and rounded off with a wistful or downright ironic “tailpiece.” In his recent facsimile edition and analysis of the volume, Loftus Jestin notes the importance of the title-page term “Designs”; the volume as a whole is deeply and ironically concerned with form, frame, and viewpoint, and it highlights those concerns (and their ironic function) within the poems themselves.

The designs, like most of the poems, are dominated by embodiments of melancholy and suffering. They also offer more startling images of repression and perversion. Jestin shows how Bentley’s satiric idiom undercuts the surface moralizing of the poems. Some of Bentley’s “pictorial witticisms” seem to be private, intended for the amusement of Walpole and his cronies; however, many of them are more obvious. Bentley quotes liberally from a wide range of classic and contemporary artworks and illustrations, including Poussin, Durer, and Hogarth; and he owes a special debt to Gravelot’s engravings for Gay’s Fables. This densely allusive mode provides a visual counterpart to Gray’s poetic procedure and mirrors the process by which Gray’s echoes of classical sources “rebuke his personae who delude themselves in a structure of seductive allusions that foster self-importance; the fictions and sentimental dreams in which they wrap themselves simultaneously undermine or reveal complacency and inertia.”⁶⁹ A particularly overt instance of pictorial undermining comes at the end of “Spring”—its tailpiece shows several cows with their rear ends toward the viewer, underlining the closing stanza’s mockery of the poet as a “poor moralist” and “solitary fly” (lines 43–44).

“Spring” is the first poem in Designs, and Jestin argues that its frontispiece functions as a prelude to the whole volume. It depicts a seated poet beneath a tree, his head supported by one hand. The naturalistic image is pressed upon from all sides by an “extraordinary busyness” of emblems—“leaves and branches, apes, musical instruments, swags, whorls,” as well as a lyre and a spade, anticipating the tomb of the Elegy, that for Jestin represents “the convolutions of a generative fancy that has been distracted and crazed with care.”⁷⁰ Many of the frontispieces and headpieces of the poem feature naked and shameless bodies: the “rosy-bosom’d Hours” of “Spring” cavort full frontally, as do the sturdy Muses who intercept the overdressed and diminutive poet in the frontispiece to “A Long Story.” The frontispiece to “Eton” features a dense crowd of naked fleshy youths disporting themselves in the Thames, while hellish embodiments of the “Ministers of human fate” wield their instruments of torture in the clouds above; Jealousy and Madness, oppressively female forms, press in from the vertical frames. The images insist that the idealized “paths of pleasure” described in the poem are sentimental fictions: there is no innocence in Eton/Eden, and, hence, Bentley “depicts the fall of the sentimentalist.”⁷¹ Snakes proliferate in the margins of the design, and Jestin finds “sadism and insanity with a hint of orgy” in the frontispiece as a whole.⁷²

If the sentimental poet is fallen in Eton, he is disabled in the Elegy, the illustrations to which present a clear contrast between “the benighted poet [who] hobbles on a cane” and the muscular peasants engaged in productive and natural labor.⁷³ Jestin also finds a pattern of allusion to the engraved illustrations to Gay’s animal Fables (1738), which serves to remind the reader of childhood fables—again, perhaps, mocking the overly complex moralizing of the Elegy. The inclusion of the “Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat” in the Designs seems further to ironize the pretentious moralizing of the volume as a whole. Likewise, the frontispiece to “A Long Story” shows the poet fleeing to an outside privy, its function more graphically evident than the politer reference in the verses to “a small closet in the garden” (line 72).

Gray’s “Stanzas to Mr Bentley” (not published until Mason 1775) pay handsome tribute to the achievement of the Designs:

The tardy rhymes that used to linger on,

    To censure cold, and negligent of fame,

In swifter measures animated run,

    And catch a lustre from his genuine flame. (lines 9–12)

But the “Stanzas” also belittle his own poetic ability to do more than elicit sympathy from “some feeling breast”; and they question the existence of any poetic talent equivalent to that of Pope, Dryden, Shakespeare, or Milton in “this benighted age” (17). Gray’s next published work eschews supporting visual illustration and also seems more adventurously to speak out in a different voice. The 1757 pamphlet containing the two Pindaric Odes “The Bard” and “The Progress of Poesy” (the first text to be published by Walpole’s Strawberry Hill Press) is, in different ways, just as performative as the Designs. Rhetorically, the poems are highly mannered, featuring alliteration, exclamation, and syntactical inversion: “Awake, Aeolian lyre, awake”; “Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!”; “Girt with many a baron bold … A different doom our fates assign.”⁷⁴ James Mulholland places Gray with other mid-eighteenth-century poets who sought to revive the “spirit of poetry” by “designing poetic voices that imitated the techniques and attitudes of oral speakers”; for them, “poetry was always elsewhere,” either geographically (Scotland, Wales, Scandinavia, India) or in the past.⁷⁵ By “positioning himself as an editor and translator of bardic voices,” deploying both “typographical and literary techniques,” Gray aimed to “textualize the face-to-face intimacy of an oral performance.”⁷⁶ He was, importantly, stimulated to finish “The Bard” and publish the two poems after hearing the blind Welsh bard John Parry performing with his harp in Cambridge.⁷⁷ Mulholland suggests that even the careful use of quotation marks in “The Bard” (which Gray himself oversaw during publication) can be seen as a technique to highlight the choric interplay of voices.⁷⁸ The aura of primitive inspiration sits oddly with Gray’s almost aggressive use of allusion in the Odes, producing a hybrid of oral incantation and recondite literary history. For the 1768 volume of poems, Gray supplied some rather truculent footnotes to the Odes, and he seems to have maintained his original position of “nobody understands me, and I am perfectly satisfied.”⁷⁹

If the ironically allusive mode of the 1742 poems enabled them to offer suggestive and semi-private meanings, the declamatory mode, allusive pomposity, and formal gravity (they are full-blown Pindarics) of “The Progress of Poesy” and “The Bard” all support their thematic concern with the serious public role of poetry. The idea of public poetry in his own day seems to have been uncongenial to Gray. Although he penned several satires in acerbic heroic couplets (which have had their fair share of admirers), “The Candidate” and “On Lord Holland’s Seat near Margate,” he did not wish them published.⁸⁰ He refused the Laureateship in 1757, and the “Ode for Music,” which he wrote in 1749 for the installation of the Duke of Grafton as chancellor of Cambridge University, is largely an exercise in self-parody, exaggerating all the most mannered moves of his own earlier poetry to produce a bizarre farrago of personifications, apostrophes, historical pageants, and moralizing declamations. The poem closes with a somewhat kinky image of Cambridge submitting “the fasces of her sway” to Grafton’s “gentle hand” (he was a well-known philanderer) and a highly ambivalent tribute to “the star of Brunswick” (George III) who “gilds the horrors of the deep”—an image, troublingly, of poetic transformation and political deception combined.

In the 1757 Odes and the later translations, in contrast, such sublime diction seems to serve a genuine public and a broadly political purpose. James Steele sees them all as Whiggish celebrations of British liberty in the context of Britain’s increasing global ascendancy during the 1750s—its “season for triumph,” as Gray puts it in a letter on August 1, 1759.⁸¹ Steele finds the poems united by their vision of “proto-British heroes in all their primitive, gothic strength” and reminds us of how many of Gray’s letters from this period show his avid interest in high politics and military news.⁸² Focusing more on literary patriotism, William Levine’s discussion of “The Progress of Poesy” explores Gray’s bold maneuver of reviving a sublime ode—with footnotes—shortly after Pope’s Dunciad had thoroughly debunked sublimity and destabilized the authority of footnotes.⁸³ The poem embodies, in Levine’s view, “a genuine poetic need to shape a new model of literary history” that was closely related to political and personal liberty and depended upon native British and Longinian models of sublimity rather than the “Aristotelian-Horatian critical inheritance” that had shaped Pope’s satiric vision.⁸⁴ In charting the westward journey of poetry from Greece to Rome to Britain, albeit “tentatively,” the poem thereby “calls for the recovery of a pure, inspired poetic history, and deviates from Pope’s graphic descriptions of dunces who contaminate literary tradition and fill Grub Street with dementia, refuse, or simply bad taste.”⁸⁵ Gray’s Odes (like the later “translations”) firmly locate poetic inspiration in the mythic landscapes—almost wildernesses—of the British countryside, safely removed from the corrupt metropolis. The closing lines of “The Progress of Poesy” seem almost literally to lift the unnamed poet “beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,” and the body of “The Bard” is purified through its suicidal plunge into the “roaring tide” of the Conway (line 144).

Although they seem to further develop the interest in ancient voices and the role of poetry in national life that the 1757 Odes had introduced into Gray’s work, the “translations” inject a new and peculiar energy into his poetic experimentation.⁸⁶ Gray’s continuing research into the origins of English poetry had inspired him to undertake the translations; “The Fatal Sisters: An Ode,” “The Descent of Odin: An Ode” are both translations of Icelandic lays, while “The Triumphs of Owen: A Fragment,” “The Death of Hoel,” “Caradoc,” and “Conan” are adaptations from Welsh. He was further stimulated by Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, purporting to be translations from “Gaelic or Erse,” in 1760. With more than a touch of camp exaggeration, Gray writes to Wharton about the Fragments that “I am gone mad about them … extasié with their infinite beauty.”⁸⁷

The physicality of the late works (the 1757 “Odes” as well as the translations) is startling. Even their formal experimentation packs a bodily punch: Mulholland shows how Gray uses slant rhyme and internal rhyme to reproduce “the double cadence that he claimed was central to Welsh oral poetry … and was ‘very pleasing’ for the listener.”⁸⁸ Johnson derided Gray’s use of alliteration in “The Bard” as “below the grandeur of a poem that endeavors at sublimity,” deaf (or at least resistant) to the primal power of Anglo-Saxon sound patterns, and perhaps subconsciously mistrustful of the dangerously sensuous impact of such devices, which were later to be used to devastating effect by Wilfrid Owen.

In a letter of 1759, Gray writes about the intensity of the “true Lyric style,” which,

with all its flights of fancy, ornaments & heightening of expression, & harmony of sound, is in its nature superior to every other style. w^ch is just the cause, why it could not be born in a work of great length, no more than the eye could bear to see all this scene, that we constantly gaze upon, the verdure of the fields & woods, the azure of the sea & skies, turn’d into one dazzling expanse of gems.⁸⁹

The letter seems to echo Pope’s warning in the Essay on Man that an oversensitized individual in an unregulated universe might “die of a rose in aromatic pain.”⁹⁰ The translated fragments seem in fact to offer just such pleasures, fascinated as they are by the bodily trauma of war, which is peculiarly linked to the process of poetic making. Poets and prophets are thrust into the midst of war and destruction, with a queer relish; as James Reeves archly noted in his 1973 “Introduction” to Gray’s poems, “Here, in part at least, are the origins of that sado-masochism which Mario Praz, in his brilliant work The Romantic Agony, has revealed as central to much Romantic writing.”⁹¹

“The Fatal Sisters” is a particularly hideous incantation—“Weave the crimson web of war”—that prophesies horror, carnage, and death and which figures the work of song in images of bodily mutilation:

See the grisly texture grow,

(Tis of human entrails made,)

And the weights that play below,

Each a gasping warrior’s head.

Shafts for shuttles, dipped in gore,

Shoot the trembling cords along.

Sword, that once a monarch bore,

Keep the tissue close and strong. (lines 9–16)

Their distancing scholarly apparatus notwithstanding, the translations indulge a fascination with a primitive warrior culture within which poetry claimed a central and destructive role through uttering curses, prophesies, and lamentations for the heroically slain. Satanic resonances in these poems seem unmediated by guilt and to be positively relished—“Dauntless on his native sands / The Dragon-son of Mona stands; / In glittering arms and glory dressed, / High he rears his ruby crest”—and the violence of the lyrics, declaimed in “the thrilling voice that wakes the dead,” seems to undo the peaceful protective work of epitaph performed by the Elegy and to confront head-on the fear of bodily trauma that Gray’s earlier poems had articulated.⁹²

Research methods today are in many ways as far removed from the body or the physical text as one could imagine, and yet digital technology, paradoxically, offers new insights into the material history of Gray’s works. The new digital age is already making available the full range of his works in manuscript, as well as the many print editions of his works from the eighteenth century to the present. Such developments will enable fresh investigations into both Gray’s allusiveness and the stages and means by which his life and works were made known to the reading public. His correspondence, miscellaneous scholarly notes, and Commonplace Books have been mined by generations of critics for the insight they provide into his creative processes or his personal loneliness, yet they may yield other insights into Gray’s engagement with the multiple discourses of the Enlightenment, ranging from the scholarly and scientific to the simply domestic. Certainly it is possible to see the letters as evidence not of the traditionally isolated Gray but of a well-connected and arch personality, confidently negotiating a variety of social roles and far from disabled by tragedy and repression. Just a few weeks after the loss of West, for instance, in one of his characteristically camp letters to his Florentine cronies John Chute and Horace Mann, he announces that “I fear I am a Blunderer about Hyacynths.”⁹³

The recently established Thomas Gray Archive (www.thomasgray.org) offers not only digital access to most of Gray’s poems and letters, but also innovative visual mapping of the phonetic and semantic structure of the poems. Such breakthroughs open up new ways of understanding Gray’s formal and sonic complexity. Construction of the ongoing Oxford University/Bodleian Library database (http://digitalmiscellaniesindex.org/) will offer fresh insights into the circulation contexts of Gray’s poems, which were often reprinted in the hundreds of anthologies and miscellanies that appeared during the eighteenth century.⁹⁴ Although several of his poems first appeared in Dodsley’s Collection, a consciously “gentlemanly” company, we may well find Gray rubbing shoulders with a more diverse range of writers and texts in other influential (but hitherto less studied) collections.⁹⁵ Recent advances in book history should encourage us further to explore the circulation, consumption, and changing meanings of Gray’s poems and, indeed, of his other works. William Ruddick has shown how Gray’s Journal of his trip to the Lake District came almost accidentally to shape early romantic responses to that newly picturesque region through being frequently quoted in Thomas West’s 1778 Guide to the Lakes. An Appendix was added to the Guide in 1779, which included extensive passages from Gray; so that “generations of visitors to the Lakes experienced Gray’s prose both directly and obliquely as part of West’s main narrative.”⁹⁶ This process mirrors the ways in which Gray’s most celebrated poems, especially the Elegy, mediate the works of now-neglected writers, modifying the words of the dead in the guts of the living to sustain the body of English literature. Technology will certainly enhance our understanding of Gray’s achievement, but the poetry’s complex power will continue to engage new generations of readers—and to thwart easy analysis.

www.thomasgray.org

This still-proliferating resource offers bibliography, criticism, teaching materials, and primary texts. The “Texts” section (sponsored by Gottingen State and University Library and the Bodleian Library) offers full electronic texts with annotations that draw on recent authoritative editions of the poems, and a “Digital Library” provides digitized images of early editions.