Thomas Gray's Sensibility and the Sublimity of Reserve

partage du sensible
,” in other words
 
a re-
distribution of the aesthetic space (the space of experience, as well as that of aesthetic 
representation) whereby previously unheeded things, practices, subjectivities—such as dead 
labourers, the lives they led and the lives they could not lead—become visible and may take 
on new political significance. And although Gray’s poem was not political as such, it was 
precisely its pathos of resignation, combined with the deliberate vagueness of its aspirations 
and the all-enveloping obscurity from which it seems to resonate, that made it so open to 
appropriation.
12
What later readers have seen as repression might be better understood as the 
projection of an ethos of sublime restraint that was the highest claim to moral authority in the 
face of “greatness”. Gray’s reserve was the best way he had of speaking out.
Laurent FOLLIOT 
Sorbonne Université 
VALE EA 4085 
Bibliography 
 
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Sexuality
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———. 
A Map of Misreading
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———. 
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Butler, Marilyn. 
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History
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12
Cf. Hazlitt’s well-known sally on Wordsworth’s reported comment that parts of it were 
unintelligible: “it has, however, been understood!” (235). 

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Clark, S.H. “‘Pendet Homo Incertus’: Gray’s Response to Locke: Part One: ‘Dull in a new way’” and 
“‘Pendet Homo Incertus’: Gray’s Response to Locke: Part Two: ‘De principiis Cogitandi.’” 
Eighteen-Century Studies 
24 (1991): 273-91, 484-503.
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Carleton University
. Montreal, London: McGill-Queen’s UP, 1974. 

Empson, William. 
Some Versions of Pastoral
. London: Chatto & Windus, 1935.
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Elegy. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2009. 

Gleckner, Robert F. 
Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship
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Gray, Thomas. 
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William Mason. London: Dodsley, and York: Todd, 1775.
———.
Correspondence
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1935.
———.