Theme: Serious poetry of Thomas Gray

I.Introduction

Content
Theme: Serious poetry of Thomas Gray
II. The Autobiography of the most important English poet Thomas Gray
1. About Thomas Gray entry into the world of poetry…………………………..…3
2. About the poems that made Thomas Gray world famous they are :" The Total Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin"………………………………………………10
3.What are the most important features of Thomas Gray's poetry?.......................15
III. Who considers Gray to be the only classic of the 18 th century……………...23
IV. Conclusion…………………………………………………………………….33
V. Bibliography…………………………………………………………………...35
I .Introduction
The operiod under analysis is often called Emizabethan times, as during this period Queen Elizabeth was sitting on a throne. The reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558-1608)is often refered to as the Golden age of English history . Elizabeth immensely popular Queen, and her popularity has waned little with the passing of four hundred years. She is still one of the best loved monarchs, and one of the most admired rulers of all time. She became a legend in her own lifetime, famed for her remarkable abilities and achievments.The period was associated with the height of the English Renaissance, and saw the flowering of literature and poetry. This was also the time during which Elizabethan theatre flourished and William Shakespeare, among others, composed plays that broke away from England's past style of plays and theatre. It was an age of expansion and exploration abroad, while at home the Protestant Reformation became entrenched in the national mindset.The Elizabeth age is viewed so highly because of the contrast with the period before and after. It was a brief period of largely internal peace between the English Reformation and the battles between Protestants and Catholics and the battles between Parliament and the monarchy that would engulf the seventeenth century. The Protestant-Catholic divide was settled, for a time by the Elizabeth Religious settlement and parliament was still not strong enough to challenge royal absolutism.England was also wel-off compared to the other nations of Europe. The Italian Renaissance had come to an end under the weight of foreign domination of the peninsual France was embroiled in its own religious battles that would only be settled 1598 with the Edict of Narites. In part because of this, but also because the English had been expelled from their last outposts on the continent, the centuries long conflict between France and England was largely suspended for most of Elizabeth's reign.Goals and objectives of the course work. The one greatrival was spain,with which England conflicted both in Europe and the Americans in skirmishes that exploded into the Anglo-spanish War of 1585-1604. An attempt by philip II of spain to invade England with the Spanish Armada in 1588 was famously defeated, but the tide of war turned against England with a disastrously unsuccessful attack upon Spain, the Drake-Norris Expedition of 1589. Thereaftee Spain provided some support for Irish Catholics in a draining guerilla war against England and Spanish naval and land forces inflicted aseries of defeats upon english forces. This badly damaged both the English Exchequer and Economy that had been so carefully restored under Elizabeth's until the signing of the treaty of London The year following Elizabeth's death. England during this period had a centralized, well-organised and effective government, largely aresult of the reforms of Henry VII and Henry VIII. Economically, the country began to benifit greatly from the new era of trans-atlantic trade.In this research we will regards English Renaissance culture and life stile, its eminent contribution to the history of England and the world culture.the main of this history research is to reveal English culture in the second half of the 16th century in all its variety.the main tasks od rhis research are : to define Wnglish culture in the second half of the 16th century , to estimate Queen Elizabeth contribution to English culture of 16th century , to display historical of English culture and their influence on English modern culrure.
1. Serious poetry of Thomas Gray
Alongside Alexander Pope, Thomas Gray is one of the most important English poets of the 18th century. Samuel Johnson was the first of many critics to put forward the view that Gray spoke in two languages, one public and the other private, and that the private language—that of his best-known and most-loved poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (published in 1751 as An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard)—was too seldom heard. William Wordsworth decided in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), using Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" (1775) as his example, that Gray, governed by a false idea of poetic diction, spoke in the wrong language; and Matthew Arnold, in an equally well-known judgment, remarked that the age was wrong for a poetry of high seriousness, that Gray was blighted by his age and never spoke out at all. Such judgments sum up the major critical history of Gray's reception and reputation as a poet.Born in Cornhill on December 26, 1716, Gray was the fifth of 12 children of Philip and Dorothy Antrobus Gray, and the only one to survive infancy. His father, a scrivener given to fits of violence, abused his wife; Dorothy left him at one point, but Philip threatened to pursue her and wreak vengeance on her, and she returned to him. From 1725-1734 Thomas Gray attended Eton, where he met Richard West and Horace Walpole, son of the powerful Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole. In 1734, Gray entered Peterhouse College, Cambridge University. Four years later he left Cambridge without a degree, intending to read law at the Inner Temple in London. Instead, he and Horace Walpole sailed from Dover on March 29,1739 for a Continental tour. The two quarreled at Reggio, Italy, in May 1741; Gray continued the tour alone, returning to London in September. In November 1741 Gray's father died; Gray's extant letters contain no mention of this event.Except for his mother, fellow poet Richard West was the person most dear to Gray, and his death from consumption on June 1, 1742 was a grievous loss to the Gray. West's death did inspire the well-known (largely because of Wordsworth's use of it) "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West," yet it is the shortest and least significant work of the year. The "Ode on the Spring" (1748) owes something to an ode West sent Gray on May 5, 1742 and An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (1747) may owe something to West's "Ode to Mary Magdelene." The "Hymn to Adversity" (1753) and the unfinished "Hymn to Ignorance" (1768) complete the work of the year, which, together with 1741, may comprise Gray's most critical emotional period.Gray's poetry is concerned with the rejection of sexual desire. The figure of the poet in his poems is often a lonely, alienated, and marginal one, and various muses or surrogate-mother figures are invoked—in a manner somewhat anticipatory of John Keats's employment of similar figures—for aid or guidance. The typical "plot" of the four longer poems of 1742 has to do with engaging some figure of desire to repudiate it, as in the "Ode on the Spring," or, as in the Eton College ode, to lament lost innocence. Sometimes, as in the "Hymn to Adversity," a harsh and repressive figure is conjured to rebuke excessive desire and to aid in the formation of a modest and humane fellowship, the transposed and social form of sexual desire. In the "Hymn to Ignorance" a goddess clearly modeled on Pope's Dulness in The Dunciad (1728) is used to rebuke the "I" who longs for the maternal and demonic presence. In different but related ways these four poems enact the poet's quest for his tutelary spirit, for the muse who will preside over the making of poetic and personal identity.
The "Ode on the Spring" was written while West was still alive and is to some extent a response to the ode he sent Gray on May 5. In West's poem "the tardy May" is asked, as "fairest nymph," to resume her reign, to "Bring all the Graces in [her] train" and preside over a seasonally reviving world. Gray's "Ode on the Spring" was sent to West at just about the time of his death and was returned unopened ("Sent to Fav: not knowing he was then Dead," Gray noted on the manuscript in his commonplace book; Favonius was Gray's affectionate name for West). The ode takes the implicit form of elegy, displacing spring from the context of renewal to that of death, and is consistent with a May 27, 1742 letter to West in which Gray explains that he is the frequent victim of "a white Melancholy, or rather Leucocholy" but is also occasionally host to "another sort, black indeed, which I have now and then felt, that has somewhat in it like Tertullian's rule of faith, Credo quia impossible est [I believe because it is impossible]; for it believes, nay, is sure of every thing that is unlikely, so it be but frightful; and, on the other hand, excludes and shuts its eyes to the most possible hopes." Already characteristic of Gray is the view advocated in the "Ode on the Spring" by a tutelary figure:
Beside some water's rushy brink
With me the Muse shall sit, and think
(At ease reclin'd in rustic state)
How vain the ardour of the Crowd,
How low, how little are the Proud,
How indigent the Great!
The lines preview Gray's appreciation in the "Elegy" of rustic simplicity against the claims of the proud and the great and reveal the inception of a poetic persona that will be adapted and modified during the coming years. The poem therefore offers a model for reading Gray's early poetry, in which the various rejections of desire are the major adventure of the speaker of the poems.In An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College, which is "about" the return of a disillusioned adult to the site of his schoolboy years, desire is represented by "grateful Science [who] still adores / Her HENRY'S holy Shade" (Henry VI was the founder of the college). The ode's opening implies the persistence of desire within the trope of loss and mourning. Science and Henry are icons of desire and loss that signify the import of the speaker's return to Eton: the apprehension of yearning and loss. What arises from the Etonian landscape are more shades, prefiguring future loss: "Ministers of human fate," Anger, Fear, Shame, images of desire defeated: "Or pineing Love shall waste their youth, / Or Jealousy with rankling tooth...." Father Thames authorizes the speaker's vision; he is a silent confirmatory figure, another version of the tutelary muse.
Muse, Contemplation (in the "Ode on the Spring"), and Father Thames are evoked for the prophetic wisdom they possess. One function of prophecy is to transform desire into "pineing Love" or the "fury Passions." The imagination's habit of personification exposes the debased forms assumed by desire ("Envy wan, and faded Care"), just as the "race of man" in the "Ode on the Spring" is revealed as insect life to "Contemplation's sober eye." Vision always serves to reveal form, and in Gray what is revealed is diminished, repudiated, or forbidden. The strategy of reductive acknowledgment in the "Ode on the Spring" dismisses the dream of desire; the strategy of creating giant spectral forms in the Eton College ode encourages bad dreams, translating desire into the demonic. Northrop Frye describes something similar to this action in his discussion of quest-romance: "Translated into dream terms, the quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but still contain that reality." Fulfillment may require, as with Gray, that a protective maternal figure displace a threatening female judicial figure; guilt is thereby dissipated in the approval received by the obedient actor who has rejected desire. This summary also describes the "Hymn to Adversity."Adversity and Virtue are both daughters of Jove; the former is older than and tutor to the latter. Adversity is equipped with "iron scourge and torturing hour" but also has an alternative "form benign," a "milder influence." Virtue needs Adversity "to form her [Virtue's] infant mind"; the function of the tutelary spirit here is to engender pity ("she learn'd to melt at others' woe"). The instruction is absorbed by Virtue (the "rigid lore / With patience many a year she bore"). Virtue, subdued by Adversity, is enabled to recognize grief ("What sorrow was, thou bad'st her know") and is preserved from desire ("Scared at thy frown terrific, fly / Self-pleasing Folly's idle brood, / Wild Laughter, Noise, and thoughtless Joy, / And leave us leisure to be good"). Adversity, implored to "lay thy chast'ning hand" on her "Suppliant's head" and to appear "Not in thy Gorgon terrors clad, / Nor circled with the vengeful band / (As by the Impious thou art seen)," suggests the threatening form of Adversity seen by those who are not "good." Desire is converted into the antithetical form of horror. The speaker who experiences Adversity's "milder influence," her "philosophic Train," undergoes a transformation in which guilt is changed into the generous emotions of love and forgiveness. Adversity here joins Muse, Contemplation, and Thames as figures authorizing the rejection of desire. At the end of the Eton College ode the reader is reminded that the suffering "all are men." At the end of the "Hymn to Adversity" the speaker asks to be taught "to love and to forgive," to be led to "know myself a Man."Gray's poems indicate a radical sexual distress. In the "Hymn to Adversity" Gray has arrived at the first clear castrative symbolism in the progress of his imagination (though one might argue that the reduction of humanity to insect life in the "Ode on the Spring" is a significant form of sexual loss), the replacement of Virtue by the poet. The threat of castration is transposed into an acceptance of it. The threatening figure of Adversity is pacified but requires a surrender of sexual identity.In the "Hymn to Ignorance" Gray returns to Cambridge, invoking its "gothic fanes, and antiquated towers" as he had Eton's "distant spires" and "antique towers." Whereas in the Eton College ode "ignorance [small i] is bliss," in the "Hymn to Ignorance" Ignorance [large I] is a "soft salutary power." Ignorance is a maternal presence ("Prostrate with filial reverence I adore") possessed of a "peaceful shade"; its "influence breathed from high / Augments the native darkness of the sky." Ignorance is ambivalently represented as undesirable within the terms of desire ("Thrice hath Hyperion rolled his annual race, / Since weeping I forsook thy fond embrace"). The oedipal actors include mother/muse (Ignorance), father (Hyperion), and the returning son/poet, Gray.On October 15, 1742 Gray returned to Peterhouse as a fellow-commoner to read for a law degree. After 1742 he wrote poetry only sporadically. He received an LL.B. degree in November 1743. He and Walpole were reconciled in 1745, though the friendship was never again quite as intimate.When Gray returned to writing poetry, he composed two poems that rebuke desire in different ways. Selima, Walpole's cat in "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Goldfishes" (1748), is tempted beyond "lawful prize" into a watery grave. The "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat" is a cautionary tale; its purpose is to deaden desire by revealing its effect on the "Presumptuous Maid!" Selima's desire to apprehend "Two angel forms ... / The Genii of the stream," is an investment in death. Implicit in the scene of desire are the unattainability of the object and the abandonment of the desiring figure to her fate: "Eight times emerging from the flood / She mew'd to ev'ry watery god." Selima's fate appears in the concluding stanza as if to Contemplation's sober eye. Her plunge into the goldfish bowl is another vain dream of the desiring self. Selima wishes to possess what is taboo; it requires her engagement with a medium in which she cannot survive. Her fate is a variation on the fate of those who would appropriate that which is beyond their proper sphere. The poem might be read as pertinent to Gray's sense of his poetic vocation: his poetic output was small, and his poems were generally short and often unfinished.In "A Long Story" (1753), composed in 1750, the Peeress whose judgment the poet fears invites him to dinner instead of rebuking him. Brought before her authority the poet disavows himself:

"He once or twice had pen'd a sonnet;

"Yet hoped, that he might save his bacon:
"Numbers would give their oaths upon it,
"He ne'er was for a conj'rer taken.["]
"A Long Story" involves a flight from the figures of desire, the "heroines" who attempt to lure the poet into polite country pleasures, leaving a note ("a spell") on the table. This self-representation points toward the poet of the "Elegy": the poet who is there heard by the hoary-headed swain, "'Muttering his wayward fancies,'" is here "something ... heard to mutter, / 'How in the park beneath an old-tree / '(Without design to hurt the butter, / 'Or any malice to the poultry,)....'" The old tree of "A Long Story" is the transplanted "nodding beech" of the "Elegy," under which the poet "'His listless length at noontide would ... stretch.'" The poet of "A Long Story" is the parodic form of the poet of the "Elegy." The shift in the "Elegy" from "I" to "thee" is prefigured in "A Long Story" in an unidentified voice which suddenly breaks in to rebuke the speaker for his tedium: "Your Hist'ry whither you are spinning? / Can you do nothing but describe?" "A Long Story" is actually a short one (145 lines) of identity mocked, function abused ("Whither are you spinning?"), and voice lost. What here dominates Gray's imagination is a vision of prophecy reduced to absurdity, of the seer as merely a bothersome miscreant
Who prowl'd the country far and near,
Bewitch'd the children of the peasants,
Dried up the cows and lam'd the deer,
And suck'd the eggs, and kill'd the pheasants.
The well-known opening of “Elegy,” "The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, / The plowman homeward plods his weary way, / And leaves the world to darkness and to me," echoes lines from John Milton and William Shakespeare (and is echoed later by James Beattie and Wordsworth). It reflects a melancholic evening mood that has probably never found better expression. The eye of the speaker moves along the periphery of vision and returns to its center, the churchyard where "The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep." As the legacy of day is the night, the legacy of the past is death, an inheritance of mortality bequeathed equally by the rich and by the poor. Everyone awaits the inevitable hour. Within the poem the brooding churchyard stands as an abiding memento mori, a powerful eschatological symbol appropriately heralded by the "droning" beetle, the "mopeing owl," the "yew-tree's shade." Against such an initial vision, as its contrary, are set the emblems of Christian eschatology: the "incense-breathing Morn," "the swallow," "the cock's shrill clarion," "the echoing horn"—none of which shall ever again rouse the slumberers. The vast negative absolute of death informs the poem, and Gray confronts the omnipresent fact of mortality, letting the confrontation arise implicitly from the opposition of the two major symbols within the poem: the chronicle and the grave, the epitaph and the churchyard.One of the abiding paradoxes of the poem resides in the idea of satisfactory unfulfillment: village-Hampdens; mute, inglorious Miltons; guiltless Cromwells of the rural life. The paradox is spawned by Gray's vision of human life as dominated by the only inevitability it contains, that of death. Before this inevitability the triumphs of man pass into insignificance, for "The paths of glory," like all paths, "lead but to the grave." Against the grave is posed the chronicle or epitaph, and the latter is of considerable complexity in the poem. It develops through various modalities before it emerges finally as the poet's own epitaph, with which the work concludes. The specific manifestations of the chronicle include the "annals of the poor," the "storied urn," the "boast of heraldry," the "animated bust," the "frail memorial." In each case the objects of remembrance are diminished by the qualifying context: the annals of the poor are "short and simple," the boast of heraldry "awaits ... th' inevitable hour," the storied urn and animated bust cannot "Back to its mansion call the fleeting breath," the memorial is "frail." Such images bespeak futility. Yet what emerges as truly valuable is human relationship. Gray's reading of epitaphs is a coming-to-know: he did not know these people as they lived; he knows them by the imaginative re-creation of their lives through a meditation on the surviving memorials.
So, too, the reader is given to understand, will the "kindred Spirit" know the narrator through his own epitaph. If in the end everyone is alone, solitude is qualified by shared mortality, and further qualified by the presence of a kindred sensibility. Mortality is not submitted to some scheme of personal salvation or redemption. The "Elegy" is not in this respect a conventional pastoral elegy; it does not provide the consolation of, say, Milton's Lycidas (1637). Gray's poem suggests that the elegist is himself powerless in the face of death, unable to refer it to a religious belief by which it can be made comprehensible. What are justified are the unrealized lives, of which the poet's life is one example. The "Elegy" is perhaps most of all an exercise in the varieties of feeling: the speaker feels for the unhonored dead and for the honored dead; he imagines particular persons for whom he can feel; he employs the pathetic fallacy to feel for the flower "born to blush unseen"; he feels for "mankind"; and through the "kindred Spirit" he feels for himself. The poem is an exercise in sensibility. The darkness in which the narrator stands is the night of mortality illuminated only by varieties of feeling. This common denominator of sympathy, as everything in the poem evidences, is all that binds man to man, and, along with the fact of death that occasions this sympathy, is the single principle of unity within life perceived by the poet.The inception of "The Progress of Poesy: A Pindaric Ode" followed directly on the publication of the "Elegy." It presents a further, yet concealed, rendering of the self-image found especially at the end of the "Elegy." "The Progress of Poesy" associates the solitary poet with his mother-muse, the female goddess to whom he owes his capacity to perceive "forms" illuminated by "the Muse's ray," a light that is "unborrow'd of the Sun." Ceres ("Ceres' golden reign") embodies the generative power of nature. "Helicon's harmonious springs" are associated with generation ("The laughing flowers ... / Drink life and fragrance as they flow"). The lyre is the "Parent of sweet and solemn-breathing airs." These three elements dominate the opening of the poem. The first ternary closes with Aphrodite ("Cytherea's day"), a figure of generative force mingling the union of water and music ("brisk notes in cadence beating"; "arms sublime, that float upon the air"). She is the reemergent Venus of the "Ode on the Spring," attended, as was Venus in that poem, by a train of celebrants: "O'er her warm cheek, and rising bosom, move / The bloom of young Desire, and purple light of Love." In the "Ode on the Spring," the "rosy-bosom'd Hours, / ... Disclose the long-expected flowers, / And wake the purple year!"The familiar Etonian demons recur in this poem: "Man's feeble race what Ills await, / Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain." In the second ternary the recognition of loss rises against the figures of desire, opposing them with "Night, and all her sickly dews." Night, a "mighty Mother" of sorts, will hold sway "Till down the eastern cliffs afar / Hyperion's march they spy, and glitt'ring shafts of war." Hyperion is an idealized figure associated through the "eastern cliffs" with Milton's Raphael, and more vaguely with Christ as he disposes half his might against Satan's legions. But the ode relegates his progress to an indefinite future, to an apocalyptic dawn that will "justify the laws of Jove." Hyperion departs from the poem at the close of the first strophe of the second ternary. Thus the defeat of Night, the graveyard goddess whose "Spectres wan, and Birds of boding cry" are the antithesis to the "rosy-crowned Loves" attending Aphrodite, is deferred.The "Muse" who appears at this point is a variation on the pastoral-maternal female, one who "deigns to hear the savage Youth repeat / In loose numbers wildly sweet / Their feather-cinctured Chiefs, and dusky Loves." She is a "soft salutary power" ("Hymn to Ignorance"), "form benign" ("Hymn to Adversity").The oedipal fantasy is played out in pastoral surroundings: "In thy green lap was Nature's Darling [Shakespeare] laid, / What time, where lucid Avon Stray'd, / To Him the mighty Mother did unveil / Her aweful face...." The anticipation of unveiling led the voyeur Milton to ride "sublime / Upon the seraph-wings of Extasy, / The secrets of th' Abyss to spy." Yet the laws of Jove are preserved: the primal scene is never viewed. The Hyperionic march is rendered irrelevant by "Such forms, as glitter in the Muse's ray"; these forms that tease Gray's own "infant eyes," bringing him into proximity to Shakespeare, the "immortal Boy." The "orient hues" that dazzled the child Gray were "unborrow'd of the sun"—another rejection of the sublime poetic (Hyperionic) principle. Between oedipal desire (the desire for the "mighty Mother") and the lonely sublime passion of the middle poet there is no adequate middle ground (though Gray hopes to find one). The "distant way" chosen by the poet at the end of the poem is necessitated by the refusal to be the poet of sublime vision (Milton) and by the impossibility of possessing the mother-muse who appears to the child of nature (Shakespeare). Much of the ode is occupied with the scene of desire—Milton's and Shakespeare's—and is thus concerned, however covertly, with the relation between sexual power and poetic vision. Gray's modest announcement at the end of the poem shows a recognition of his distance from the great figures of English literature and from the power with which their visions were informed: he is "Beneath the Good ... but far above the Great"—in any event, alone."The Bard: A Pindaric Ode" (1757) is a companion piece to "The Progress of Poesy." It presents another identity, a solitary prophet who can more readily justify the laws of Jove than can any agent in the "The Progress of Poesy." At the beginning of the ode he is "Robed in the sable garb of woe," the insignia of his office. At the end he "plung[es] to endless night," another entrance into darkness. The plunge into the abyss seems to be a wish-fulfillment fantasy; the mighty Mother is darkness itself, the unshaped figure of desire. The poet who strikes "the deep sorrows of his lyre" in "The Bard" produces not the "sweet and solemn-breathing airs" of "The Progress of Poesy" but the harmonies of loss and consolation.The Eton College ode identifies the progress of human life in terms of absolute separation between youth and age. The "Ode on the Pleasure Arising from Vicissitude," written around 1754-1755 and published in 1775, recreates, through the language of kindredness, the law of succession and cycle: "Still, where rosy Pleasure leads, / See a kindred Grief pursue." "Rosy Pleasure" is joined here to an opposite that follows it in an endless alternation. The "blended form" composed by the two figures unifies the figures of desire and authority in what is apparently Gray's version of the marriage of heaven and hell. The principle of authority (and desire) is found in Vicissitude, a figure who imposes an Adversity-like "chastening": "The hues of Bliss more brightly glow, / Chastised by sabler tints of woe...." The ode negates its initial figure of desire, "the golden Morn aloft" who
... woo's the tardy spring:
Till April starts, and calls around
The sleeping fragrance from the ground;
And lightly o'er the living scene
Scatters his freshest, tenderest green.
Morn and April give way to tableaux in which the kindred activities of mourning and consolation are enacted: "Smiles on past Misfortune's brow / Soft Reflection's hand can trace; / And o'er the cheek of Sorrow throw / A melancholy grace." The initial act of wooing becomes another sort of engagement, Grief pursuing rosy Pleasure, Comfort approaching Misery. The "blended form" is a sublimation of the sexual ardor between Morn and April, transformed into a depersonalized aesthetic in which "artful strife" and "strength and harmony" displace the seductive Morn who "With vermeil cheek and whisper soft / ... woo's the tardy spring." Courtship is metamorphosed into consolation, and Vicissitude becomes another figure like Contemplation or Adversity, under whose aegis desire is eliminated. Vicissitude, unlike Adversity, is a genderless figure, representing no threatening sexual image. The ode revisits another place, as Eton is revisited by the disillusioned speaker in An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College or as Gray returns to Cambridge in the "Hymn to Ignorance." Here the return is to the beginning of the "Elegy," to "darkness" and to the landscape over which the "plowman homeward plods his weary way." All of Gray's poems are poems of progress, journeys in which the challenge lies in discovering something other than the circularity of ends that are constituted of beginnings ("And they that creep, and they that fly, / Shall end where they began"). Gray's mother died on March 11, 1753. On March 5, 1756 he moved from Peterhouse College across the street to Pembroke College, reportedly as a consequence of a prank played on him by some students who, knowing of his fear of fire, raised a false alarm. When the master of Peterhouse, Dr. Law, failed to take Gray's complaint about the prank seriously, Gray "migrated" to Pembroke. When the poet laureate, Colley Cibber, died in 1757, Gray was offered the position; but he declined it. In July 1759 he moved to London to study at the British Museum, which had been opened to the public in January. In December 1761 he returned to Cambridge; except for frequent trips to London, other parts of England, Scotland, and Wales, he remained in Cambridge for the rest of his life.Poems by Mr. Gray (1768) includes two translations from the Norse. "The Fatal Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" are poems of prophecy. The first is dominated by what Gray in the preface calls "twelve gigantic figures resembling women" whose purpose is to weave the web of futurity and whose way leads through another field of the dead ("As the paths of fate we tread, / Wading thro' th' ensanguin'd field...." The easily identifiable figure of desire in the early verse has been replaced by vast terrifying forms, "Mista black, terrific Maid, / Sangrida, and Hilda," "Gondula, and Geira." Such women appeared first as Contemplation or Adversity. They represent the combined identities of muse-mother-death, the unified form of desire and authority toward which Gray's imagination has been traveling."The Descent of Odin" concerns Odin's visit to the underworld—the kingdom of Hela, Goddess of Death—to discover his son Balder's fate; he learns from the prophetess that Hoder will murder Balder and that Vali, the son of Odin and Rinda, will avenge the crime. The "prophetic Maid" is revealed as the "Mother of the giant-brood." Odin wakes her with "runic rhyme; / Thrice pronounc'd, in accents dread." The poem with the maid denying prophetic knowledge to any future "enquirer ... / ... till substantial Night / Has reassum'd her ancient right." The maid's last oracular utterance is a vision of ultimate closure, when "wrap'd in flames, in ruin hurl'd, / Sinks the fabric of the world."In July 1768 Gray was made professor of modern history at Cambridge, though he never lectured or published on the subject. The most significant personal event of his last years was a brief, intense friendship with a young Swiss student, Karl Victor von Bonstetten. The friendship was apparently complicated by physical desire on Gray's part, though no sexual relation is believed to have occurred between them. In July 1771 Gray became ill while dining at Pembroke College; a week later, on July 30, he died. In his Souvenirs (1832) Bonstetten reflected on the poet: "Je crois que Gray n'avait jamais aimé, c'était le mot de l'énigme, il en était résulté une misère de coeur qui faisait contraste avec son imagination, ardente et profond qui, au lieu de faire le bonheur de sa vie, n'en était que le tourment" (I think the key to the mystery is that Gray never loved; the result was a poverty of heart contrasting with his ardent and profound imagination, which, instead of comprising the happiness of his life, was only its torment).Gray’s literary achievements—like those of William Collins, James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton, William Cowper, Christopher Smart, and Joseph and Thomas Warton­—were overshadowed by the emergence in the 1780s and 1790s of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and the quickly succeeding second generation of Romantic writers.
POEMS BY THOMAS GRAY
The Bard: A Pindaric Ode
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
The Fatal Sisters: An Ode
See All Poems by Thomas Gray
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Early life and educationThomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of 12 children, and the only child of Philip and Dorothy Gray to survive infancy.[1] He lived with his mother after she lefthis abusive father.He was educated at Eton College where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time ofgreat happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and scholarlyboy who spent his time reading and avoiding athletics. He lived in his uncle’s household rather than at college. Hemade three close friends at Eton: Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Thomas Ashton, andRichard West, later to be appointed as Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The four prided themselves on their sense of style,sense of humour, and appreciation of beauty.In 1734 Gray went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He found the curriculum dull. He wrote letters to friends listingall the things he disliked: the masters ("mad with Pride") and the Fellows ("sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things."Intended by his family for the law, he spent most of his time as an undergraduate reading classical and modernliterature, and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation.In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Walpole on his Grand Tour of Europe, possibly at Walpole's expense.The two fell out and parted in Tuscany, because Walpole wanted to attend fashionable parties and Gray wanted tovisit all the antiquities. They were reconciled a few years later.Writing and academia Gray began seriously writing poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a self-imposed programme of literary study, becoming one of the most learned men of his time, though he claimed to be lazy by inclination. Gray was a brilliant bookworm, a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar, often afraid of the shadows of his own fame.[3] He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It is said that the change of college was the result of a practical joke.Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin travelling again.Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to fewer than 1,000 lines), he is regarded as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. Gray was so self-critical and fearful of failure that he published only thirteen poems during his lifetime. He once wrote that he feared his collected works would be "mistaken for the works of a flea". Walpole said that "He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour."[citation needed] Gray came to be known as one of the "Graveyard poets" of the late 18th century, along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper,and Christopher Smart. Gray perhaps knew these men, sharing ideas about death, mortality, and the finality and sublimity of death.In 1762, the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure which carried a salary of £400, fell vacant after the death of Shallet Turner, and Gray's friends lobbied the government unsuccessfully to secure the position forhim. In the event, Gray lost out to Lawrence Brockett, but he secured the position in 1768 after Brockett's death.[4]"Elegy" masterpiece It is believed that Gray began writing his masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of St Giles parishchurch in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in 1742. After several years of leaving it unfinished, he completed it in 1750[5] (see Elegy for the form). The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 (see 1751 in poetry). Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek.[citation needed] It is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language. In 1759 during the Seven Years War, before theBattle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to his officers, adding:"Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow".Monument, in Stoke Poges, inscribed with Gray'sElegyThe Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill.[citationIt contains many phrases which have entered the commonEnglish lexicon, either on their own or as quoted in other works.[citation These include: "The Paths of Glory"• "Celestial fire"• "Some mute inglorious Milton"• "Far from the Madding Crowd"
• "The unlettered muse" "Kindred spirit"Gray also wrote light verse, including Ode on the Death of a FavouriteCat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, a mock elegy concerning Horace Walpole's cat. After setting the scene with the couplet "What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?", the poem moves to its multiple proverbial conclusion: "a fav'rite has no friend", "[k]now one false step is ne'er retrieved" and "nor all that glisters,gold". (Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase (the tub) on a pedestal at his house in Strawberry Hill.)Gray’s surviving letters also show his sharp observation and playful sense of humour. He is well known for his phrase, "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wGray began seriously writing poems in 1742, mainly after the death of his close friend Richard West, which inspired "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West". He moved to Cambridge and began a self-directed programme of literary study, becoming one of the most learned men of his time.[8] He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. According to Britannica, Gray moved to Pembroke after the students at Peterhouse played a prank on him.[9]Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin travelling again. Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to fewer than 1,000 lines), he is regarded as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. Gray was so self-critical and fearful of failure that he published only thirteen poems during his lifetime. He once wrote that he feared his collected works would be "mistaken for the works of a flea." Walpole said that "He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour."[10] Gray came to be known as one of the "Graveyard poets" of the late 18th century, along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, and Christopher Smart. Gray perhaps knew these men, sharing ideas about death, mortality, and the finality and sublimity of death.
In 1762, the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure which carried a salary of £400, fell vacant after the death of Shallet Turner, and Gray's friends lobbied the government unsuccessfully to secure the position for him. In the event, Gray lost out to Lawrence Brockett, but he secured the position in 1768 after Brockett's death.Gray considered his two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, as his best works. Pindaric odes are to be written with fire and passion, unlike the calmer and more reflective Horatian odes such as Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College. The Bard tells of a wild Welsh poet cursing the Norman king Edward I after his conquest of Wales and prophesying in detail the downfall of the House of Plantagenet. It is melodramatic, and ends with the bard hurling himself to his death from the top of a mountain.When his duties allowed, Gray travelled widely throughout Britain to places such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Scotland and most notably the Lake District (see his Journal of a Visit to the Lake District in 1769) in search of picturesque landscapes and ancient monuments. These elements were not generally valued in the early 18th century, when the popular taste ran to classical styles in architecture and literature, and most people liked their scenery tame and well-tended. The Gothic details that appear in his Elegy and The Bard are a part of the first foreshadowing of the Romantic movement that dominated the early 19th century, when William Wordsworth and the other Lake poets taught people to value the picturesque, the sublime, and the Gothic.[27] Gray combined traditional forms and poetic diction with new topics and modes of expression, and may be considered as a classically focused precursor of the romantic revival. Gray's connection to the Romantic poets is vexed. In the prefaces to the 1800 and 1802 editions of Wordsworth's and Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth singled out Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" to exemplify what he found most objectionable in poetry, declaring it wasIt is believed by a number of writers that Gray began writing arguably his most celebrated piece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of St Giles' parish church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire (though this claim is not exclusive), in 1742. After several years of leaving it unfinished, he completed it in 1750[20] (see elegy for the form). The poem was a literary sensation when published by Robert Dodsley in February 1751 (see 1751 in poetry). Its reflective, calm, and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted, and translated into Latin and Greek. It is still one of the most popular and frequently quoted poems in the English language.[21] In 1759, during the Seven Years War, before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to one of his officers, adding, "I would prefer being the author of that Poem to the glory of beating the French to-morrow." Monument, in Stoke Poges, inscribed with Gray's ElegyThe Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill. It contains many phrases which have entered the common English lexicon, either on their own or as quoted in other works. These include: "The Paths of Glory" (the title of a 1957 anti-war movie about World War I, produced by and starring Kirk Douglas, and directed by Stanley Kubrick, based on a novel of the same name by Humphrey Cobb).
"Celestial fire"
"Some mute inglorious Milton"
"Far from the Madding Crowd" (the title of an eponymous novel by Thomas Hardy, filmed several times)
"Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, and waste its sweetness on the desert air," is quoted often, including by Annie Savoy (Susan Sarandon) in the film Bull Durham
"The unlettered muse"
"Kindred spirit"
William Blake's illustration for Thomas Gray "Elegy" contemplates such themes as death and afterlife. These themes foreshadowed the upcoming Gothic movement. It is suggested that perhaps Gray found inspiration for his poem by visiting the grave-site of his aunt, Mary Antrobus. The aunt was buried at the graveyard by the St. Giles' churchyard, which he and his mother would visit. This is the same grave-site where Gray himself was later buried. Gray also wrote light verse, including Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, a mock elegy concerning Horace Walpole's cat. After setting the scene with the couplet "What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?", the poem moves to its multiple proverbial conclusion: "a fav'rite has no friend", "[k]now one false step is ne'er retrieved" and "nor all that glisters, gold". (Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase (the tub) on a pedestal at his house in Strawberry Hill.) Gray's surviving letters also show his sharp observation and playful sense of humour. He is well known for his phrase, "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise.", from Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. It has been asserted that the Ode also abounds with images which find "a mirror in every mind".[24] This was stated by Samuel Johnson who said of the poem, "I rejoice to concur with the common reader ... The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirror in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo".[2] Indeed, Gray's poem follows the style of the mid-century literary endeavour to write of "universal feelings."[25] Samuel Johnson also said of Gray that he spoke in "two languages". He spoke in the language of "public" and "private" and according to Johnson, he should have spoken more in his private language as he did in his "Elegy" poeIn stanzas 10–18, Gray unleashes a forceful attack on the assumption that the rustic poor are inherently less valuable to society than the rich and powerful people who wield the “pomp of pow’r” and “all that wealth e’re gave.” Gray illustrates his views with the monuments by which the dead are remembered. The poem asks whether the wealthy and powerful can be brought back to life by “storied urn or animated bust” any more effectively than the poor, whose graves are marked by “no trophies.”Gray’s speaker, himself not part of the upper stratum of English society, notes that, among the rustic dead may lie “some heart once pregnant with celestial fire,” indicating a would-be poet. But such commoners live lives in which brilliant achievements are unobtainable, because “chill Penury repress’d their noble rage.” That is, poverty ruins their chances of development. Poverty is personified as “chill Penury” to frame it as an active force militating against a person’s growth in mind and spirit. In stanza 15, Gray alludes to notable figures—John Hampden, Milton, and Cromwell—who represent lives that the commoners in the graves could never emulate, because of the difficulty of their lives. Gray makes it clear that, because of poverty, many potential Miltons and Hampdens go undeveloped and therefore unvalued.Rural Life and Remembrance In one of the most quoted passages of the poem, Gray introduces his argument that despite the anonymity of the commoners buried in the churchyard, they must be memorialized and thereby remembered: “Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife, / Their sober wishes never learn’d to stray.” These lines express a sense that rustic life is ennobling by virtue of its difficulties and modesty; indeed, it is superior to the “ignoble strife” of city life. The ensuing stanzas elevate the commoners’ “frail” memorials with “uncouth rhymes” to the status of the “shrine of Luxury and Pride” that marks the graves of the wealthy and powerful. Although the rustic villagers are not valued by the wealthy, they have an intrinsic value that transcends social class. The poem suggests that the common person who passes on deserves a memorial to signify his or her passing, as well as to provide a place for the living to commemorate the dead. After all, “the parting soul relies” on the living to be remembered and lamented. Gray ultimately laments that no one leaves this life, “the warm precincts of the cheerful day,” without looking back with longing and regret.Poetry and Posterity Gray’s speaker is, like Gray, a poet. Although it is impossible to determine the degree to which the speaker represents Gray himself, the speaker’s meditation on his own death and memorialization at the end of the poem marks a personal turn. The speaker addresses himself in stanza 24 to inquire how “some kindred spirit” might ask about his the poet’s life and death, and in a shift of roles, places the narrative in the hands of a villager who briefly recounts the behavior of the village poet, Gray’s speaker and alter ego.The villager describes an isolated man, “now dropping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, / Or crazed with care,” who disappears one day, and having died, is being taken to the churchyard for burial. The last section of the poem is the speaker’s epitaph, which describes him as he has described the villagers in the churchyard: “to Fortune and to Fame unknown.” Gray adds an important quality, however, that points to his own conception of what makes a poet an accurate observer of life: “And Melancholy mark’d him for her own,” by which he means that the speaker has poetic sensibilities, including an understanding of the sorrows that all humankind is subject to. Last, the poet notes that his good and bad qualities are no longer worth examining because he is in God’s hands. This final section dramatizes the position of the poet, who witnesses and memorializes the lives of others while being mortal himself, as liable to fall into obscurity as his subjects. However, one can hardly read the poem today without noting that Gray, for his part, is far from forgotten.
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Explore PoetsGO!Best Poem Of Thomas GrayElegy Written In A Country ChurchyardThe Curfew tolls the knell of parting day,The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea,
The plowman homeward plods his weary way,
And leaves the world to darkness and to me.

Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight,

And all the air a solemn stillness holds,
Save where the beetle wheels his droning flight,
And drowsy tinklings lull the distant folds;

Save that from yonder ivy-mantled tow'r

The moping owl does to the moon complain
Of such as, wand'ring near her secret bow'r,
Molest her ancient solitary reign.
Beneath those rugged elms, that yew-tree's shade,
Where heaves the turf in many a mould'ring heap,
Each in his narrow cell for ever laid,
The rude Forefathers of the hamlet sleep.

The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,

The swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing horn,
No more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall burn,
Or busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's return, Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share.Elegy Written in a Country ChurchyardAs the title suggests, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is an elegy that mourns the death of the people of the village that lie buried in a country churchyard. Thomas Gray, in this poem, pays a small tribute to the humble and obscure people that lie buried in the graves. They were insignificant and more humble compared to the people of the privileged sections of the society. The tone of the poem is mournful, melancholic and thoughtful. The poet says that after death, even the privileged lies under the earth in the same way the poor and ordinary people does. The poor died unsung, unhonored and unwept. Had they been given the privilege, they would have achieved something with their talents that remained undiscovered. In the end, the poet says that one day the poet too will die and be buried in the same graveyard, and the epitaph that he wrote for himself would be inscribed on his tomb.Ode on the Death of a Favourite CatThe poem, "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat," is based on a real incident that happened in the house of poet’s friend. The friend had two cats and one day he informed the poet that one of them had died. The cat named Selima sat in a resting posture by the side of a vase full of water. Selima looked at her reflection in the water and felt satisfied with herself but then her eyes fell prey to the two tempting gold fish which were swimming in the water. Selima wanted to catch one of those wishes just as a woman cannot resist her temptation to acquire gold. Selima was an over-confident creature who kept trying to catch hold of the fish but the fate sat by her smiling at her vain attempts. The brim of the vase betrayed her and she fell into the vase. She prayed to every God to rescue her from drowning but to no avail. Neither Tom (the make cat in the house) nor Susan (the other female cat) heard her voice. Thus, Selima drowned and died. At the end of the poem, the poet suggests that one false step can lead to disastrous consequences. Every metal that glitters may not be gold.Gray is a great and matchless elegiac poet in the annals of English poetry. He indulged himself in the luxury of tears. Melancholy is the distinguishing feature of his poems. His poetry is full of sorrow, suffering, disease and death. As a true mourner Gray mourns the tragic fate of mankind. He always deals with the mortality and meaninglessness of human life.His 'ELEGY...' is a sincere song of mourning. Thus Gray is par excellence a poet of death and mourning.Thomas Gray is transitional poet. He showed his merit between the Neo-Classical and Romantic Age. Thus his position as a classic and as a precursor of Romanticism is established. It is said that he begaAs a precursor of English Romantic movement Gray had no sympathy for the conventional verse. He tried to break through the bounds of the prevailing patterns of poetry. He stood strongly against the bondage of rules, conventions and customs. He sought and found inspiration in the literature of the past. He had love for nature, medieval-ism, Hellenism and melancholy. He had sympathy for the weak and the poor.These all are the prominent characteristics of the Romantic poetry.As a great poet Gray showed his metrical excellence but he never sacrificed sense to sound. He was in the habit of using antithesis, personification, epigrams,circumlocutions, allegories and compound words.His poetry is lyrical in form and refined in style. There is musical virtuosity in his poetry.He avoided the predominant couplet and preferred the stanza. Thus Gray is great, matchless and immortal poet. He wrote poetry with a great degree of ease and comfort. He will be remembered for ever for his simplicity, tenderness, human touch and universal feelings. In his poems he attained the sublimity of Milton and the harmony of Pope. Thus he holds a singular position in the history of English poetry.n his career as Classicist but ended as a Romantic poet.Matthew Arnold (1822-1888), the Victorian poet and critic, was 'the first modern critic' [1], and could be called 'the critic's critic', being a champion not only of great poetry, but of literary criticism itself. The purpose of literary criticism, in his view, was 'to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas', and he has influenced a whole school of critics including new critics such as T. S. Eliot, F. R. Leavis, and Allen Tate. He was the founder of the sociological school of criticism, and through his touchstone method introduced scientific objectivity to critical evaluation by providing comparison and analysis as the two primary tools of criticismArnold's evaluations of the Romantic poets such as Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, and Keats are landmarks in descriptive criticism, and as a poet-critic he occupies an eminent position in the rich galaxy of poet-critics of English literature.T. S. Eliot praised Arnold's objective approach to critical evaluation, particularly his tools of comparison and analysis, and Allen Tate in his essay Tension in Poetry imitates Arnold's touchstone method to discover 'tension', or the proper balance between connotation and denotation, in poetry. These new critics have come a long way from the Romantic approach to poetry, and this change in attitude could be attributed to Arnold, who comes midway between the two schools.The social role of poetry and criticismTo Arnold a critic is a social benefactor. In his view the creative artist, no matter how much of a genius, would cut a sorry figure without the critic to come to his aid. Before Arnold a literary critic cared only for the beauties and defects of works of art, but Arnold the critic chose to be the educator and guardian of public opinion and propagator of the best ideas.Cultural and critical values seem to be synonymous for Arnold. Scott James, comparing him to Aristotle, says that where Aristotle analyses the work of art, Arnold analyses the role of the critic. The one gives us the principles which govern the making of a poem, the other the principles by which the best poems should be selected and made known. Aristotle's critic owes allegiance to the artist, but Arnold's critic has a duty to society.To Arnold poetry itself was the criticism of life: 'The criticism of life under the conditions fixed for such criticism by the laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty', and in his seminal essay The Study of Poetry' 1888) he says that poetry alone can be our sustenance and stay in an era where religious beliefs are fast losing their hold. He claims that poetry is superior to philosophy, science, and religion. Religion attaches its emotion to supposed facts, and the supposed facts are failing it, but poetry attaches its emotion to ideas and ideas are infallible. And science, in his view is incomplete without poetry. He endorses Wordsworth's view that 'poetry is the impassioned expression which is in the countenance of all Science', adding 'What is a countenance without its expression?' and calls poetry 'the breath and finer spirit of knowledge'. As a critic Arnold is essentially a moralist, and has very definite ideas about what poetry should and should not be. A poetry of revolt against moral ideas, he says, is a poetry of revolt against life, and a poetry of indifference to moral ideas is a poetry of indifference to life.Arnold even censored his own collection on moral grounds. He omitted the poem Empedocles on Etna from his volume of 1853, whereas he had included it in his collection of 1852. The reason he advances, in the Preface to his Poems of 1853 is not that the poem is too subjective, with its Hamlet-like introspection, or that it was a deviation from his classical ideals, but that the poem is too depressing in its subject matter, and would leave the reader hopeless and crushed. There is nothing in it in the way of hope or optimism, and such a poem could prove to be neither instructive nor of any delight to the reader.Aristotle says that poetry is superior to History since it bears the stamp of high seriousness and truth. If truth and seriousness are wanting in the subject matter of a poem, so will the true poetic stamp of diction and movement be found wanting in its style and manner. Hence the two, the nobility of subject matter, and the superiority of style and manner, are proportional and cannot occur independently.Arnold took up Aristotle's view, asserting that true greatness in poetry is given by the truth and seriousness of its subject matter, and by the high diction and movement in its style and manner, and although indebted to Joshua Reynolds for the expression 'grand style', Arnold gave it a new meaning when he used it in his lecture On Translating Homer Thomas Gray was born in London in 1716. His parents had twelve children and all except Thomas died at an early age. When he was eight years old, he entered Eton College, where he made several close friends: the short-lived Richard West, who also wrote poetry and on whose death Gray composed a sonnet dismissed by Wordsworth as artificious; Thomas Ashton, who would become an influential preacher and divine; and Horace Walpole, the son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole and the author of the novel The Castle of Otranto, one of the seminal texts of the Gothic genrethe dark imagery of Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” resembles that of Gothic fiction. With Walpole, Gray travelled to France and Italy. The four friends were famialiarly named “the Quadruple Alliance”. Gray would identify his years at Eton with his paradise lost in “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College”.Horace Walpole, one of Gray’s lifelong friendsAfter completing his education at Eton, Gray became a Law student at Peterhouse, the oldest college of the University of Cambridge. After years of isolated writing and reading, he became a professor and taught history. He attempted dramatic verse and started thorough research aimed at writing a history of English poetry, which he did not finish. His knowledge of English literature was wide and he had the qualities of a literary historian. He was also well versed in Latin (the influence of the Pindaric ode is clearly observable), Celtic and Norse poetry.The art of Gray and some of his contemporaries marks a transition from the poetry of satire and witof which Alexander Pope was the greatest exponentto a new poetry less dependent on the immediate social reality. Although Gray evidently looked up to classical models, his poetry deviates from the prescriptive emphasis of Neoclassicism or the Augustan Age to introduce an openly subjective component that prefigures the poetic theory and practice of the Romantics. Not surprisingly, Gray has been labelled, together with his contemporary William Collins, “Pre-Romantic”.Literary critics as distant in time as Samuel Johnson or T. S. Eliot have drawn attention to Gray’s limitations as a poet, while prasing his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”arguably his only poem to stand the test of time. It was composed in 1747-8, some fourty years before the publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads (1798), considered to mark the beginning of English Romanticism. In Gray’s “Elegy” we find themes that have concerned poets from times immemorial: the vanity of life, the certainty of mortality, the discrepancy between merit and fame, the communication of the living with the dead. On the other hand, there are traits that clearly foreshadow the Romantic spirit: a melancholy tone, a subjective point of view and an introspective lyrical speaker, Gothic imagery, the mirror-like identification between the lyrical speaker’s mood and the gloomy landscape. These definig traits of “Elegy” could apply to poems composed by the so-called “Graveyard Poets”, which include Gray himself, Edward Young and Robert Blair.
Gray has also been admired for the style of his letters, in which he sometimes included and glossed over poetic compositions of his own or evoked his visits to the north of England and Scotland. His descriptions of impressive scenessuch as the Lake Districtillustrate the notions of the sublime and the picturesque, and also anticipate the Romantic veneration of Nature.Thomas Gray died in 1771 and was buried in the graveyard at Stoke Poges (Buckinghamshire), where he had frequently stood by his mother’s grave and probably found the inspiration to write his most celebrated poem.Thomas Gray, a poet and literary scholar, was born on December 26, 1716 in London to Philip and Dorothy Gray. His mother gave birth to twelve children but Thomas was the only one who survived. In 1725, Dorothy separated from Philip and wither her own money sent her son to Eton College. For this reason, Thomas Gray says he is indebted to his mother for his education (Damrosch). Due to the fact that she sent him to Eton, he met his three best friends, Richard West (son of the lord chancellor of Ireland), Thomas Ashton (son of a school master) and Horace Walpole (youngest son of Sir Robert Walpole who was the prime minister). The boys formed a beautiful friendship and referred to themselves as the ‘quadruple alliance.’ They gave each other nicknames that indicated their common interest in the theater and French literature (Huber). Ashton was Almanzor from John Dryden’s Conquest of Granada; Walpole was Celadon from D’Urfé’s Astrée; West was Favonius or Zephyrus for the Latin names of the west winds; and Gray was Orosmades from Nathaniel Lee’s The Rival Queens. While in school, Gray was passionate about reading books in Greek in French and did not care for basic mathematics and philosophy (Thomas Gray). He also enjoyed studying architecture, history and botany. It was during his time at Eton College, that Gray found himself beginning to “take pleasure in reading Virgil for his own amusement, & not in school-hours, or as a task” (Baird). He gained the reputation of a Latin verse writer. In 1734, Thomas Gray left Eton and decided to attend Cambridge. He was awarded the Cosin scholarship, which required him “to wear a Square Cape, to make 6 Latin verses upon the Epistal or Gospel every Sunday morning, to chant very loud in Chapel, to wear a clean Surplice” (Baird). At Cambridge, Gray chose to study law. However, in October 1736, he left Cambridge and decided not to pursue the BA degree that would qualify him to read law at the Inner Temple (Thomas Gray).