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55 3 Leaving the World to Darkness: Gray The way to solve the problem you see in life is to live in a way that makes the problem disappear. —Ludwig Wittgenstein Although Thomas Gray later became suspicious of its success, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751) was immensely popular from its first appearance.1 And its continued popularity led Edmund Gosse in 1882, more than a century after initial publication, to describe Gray’s “Elegy” as the ideal English “poem of poems,” an epithet one might not associate with a poem capable of producing controversy.2 And yet, in the middle years of the twentieth century the poem inspired the so-called Stonecutter Controversy, the result of several competing readings of the poem’s enigmatic figures of address. It may be that controversies are most likely to erupt around poems previously identified as ideal. In their treatises on education, Locke and Rousseau offer practical advice for improving reading instruction, but how does one teach children to read when, as the text of Rousseau’s Émile demonstrates, the attempt adequately to formalize language introduces its own textual complexities? Locke offers lessons in reading through a “chance-writing” that cannot easily be said to address the pupil, since it comes from no authoring consciousness, and Rousseau offers a lesson in reading that turns on the ability of one text (Robinson Crusoe) to control one’s experience of others, as if Robinson Crusoe were not subject to the same textual drifting found within Émile and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.” If poetry is frequently celebrated for its ability to introduce the textual drifting that reading pedagogues, such as Rousseau, abhor, what do poems teach readers about the rhetorical tropes that determine discussions of reading? Famous for a problematic figure of address, what does Gray’s “Elegy” show readers about language’s tendency to address in the absence of meaning or mean in the absence of address? Significantly, Gray’s poem not only inspires numerous and competing interpretations but also anticipates and allegorizes the effort to read it. Gray’s “Elegy” foregrounds the tropological dimension of reading that 56 Chapter 3 Locke and Rousseau, for example, labor to eliminate in their drive to secure the relationship between language, address, and cognition. If the term “literature” has come to include those texts capable of producing and sustaining divergent interpretations, then Gray’s “Elegy” reflects on the emergence of this definition and on its pedagogical power. ޮ From the “Poem of Poems” to a “Controversy” Gray’s “Elegy” achieved immense popularity before the controversy it inspired in the twentieth century in part because it was strikingly unoriginal. In his Lives of the English Poets, Samuel Johnson, who for the most part is critical of Gray’s poems, celebrates the “Elegy” because it “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.”3 Readers find their thoughts and feelings echoed back to them as the poem accurately anticipates and captures what is common to “every” reader. Like Johnson centuries earlier, I. A. Richards in 1929 similarly describes the poem’s universal appeal: “It would be difficult to maintain that the thought in this poem is striking or original, or that its feeling is exceptional. It embodies a sequence of reflections and attitudes that under similar conditions arise readily in any contemplative mind.”4 Richards celebrates the poem not because it is bold or original but because it is powerfully commonplace. The poet-speaker stands for a universal contemplative mind. In this way, the poem’s success is linked to Gray’s ability to communicate “unexceptional” thoughts and feelings and so move from the particular experience of the poet-speaker to general reflection.5 The poem is understood to achieve epistemological certainty in uniting the particular (experience, sensation, phenomenon) and the general (reflection, cognition, understanding), and readers who find themselves in the poem find themselves as universally recognizable, unexceptional, “mirroured,” and so addressed.6 One learns to read the poem with a properly contemplative mind. And perhaps for this reason, its place in school curricula was for centuries unquestioned. The critical reception of Gray’s “Elegy” in the twentieth century, however , was complicated by attempts to account for the identity of the youth commemorated in the concluding epitaph.7 “The problem,” as Herbert W. Starr writes in Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gray’s Elegy, “is essentially one of pronominal reference.”8 The poet, having established the...

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