Situating the Careers of Gray and Other British Poets of the Long Eighteenth Century in Their Times: Some Biographical, Historicist, Contextualist, and Formalist Treatments

Robert F. Gleckner. Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship(Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Pp. xii + 231. $55.95 cloth.

Dustin Griffin. Patriotism and Poetry in Eighteenth-Century Britain(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002). $60.00 cloth.

Robert Mack. Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000). Pp. xviii + 718. $39.95 cloth.

B. Eugene McCarthy. Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet(Madison and Teaneck, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; London: Associated University Presses, 1997). Pp. 279. $42.50 cloth.

William Roberts, ed. Thomas Gray's Journal of His Visit to the Lake District in October 1769(Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001). Pp. 160. $17.95 paper.

Linda Zionkowski. Men's Work: Gender, Class, and the Professionalization of Poetry, 1660-1784 (New York: Palgrave, 2001). Pp. viii + 279. $49.95 cloth.

Thomas Gray has been too readily taken as the solitary speaker of his elegy, retired from public life, living most of his adult life as Fellow-Commoner, later as Regius Professor of Modern History, in effect a sinecure, at Cambridge. Though he relied on a network of well-placed friends from his school days to obtain this position and other privileges during his life, his fairly small body of verse, with a few notable exceptions, did not openly address the public concerns of his time. Paradoxically, he published one of the most widely read English poems of the entire eighteenth century and beyond, his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751), an ambivalent but reverential commemoration of the ordinary, forgotten lives of rural villagers, an admonishment of the rich and powerful who have obtained their status through ill-gotten means, and, towards its close, a self-referential defense of the solitary, frustrated poet who belongs to neither class and can hope to be remembered only through the empathetic sensibility of "some kindred spirit." Depending on one's critical perspective, the Elegy either levels distinctions between rich and poor— "The paths of glory lead but to the grave"— or simply legitimates the status quo, naturalizing the standing class structure through large-scale tactics of consolation. Even this poem reached the public largely against Gray's ostensible intentions or before he felt prepared to face an audience larger than a reliable coterie of like-minded friends. If all of Gray's poems do not similarly depict the distance of their speakers from the public currents of his times or thematize their disconnection from an implied audience, then they are often placed in remote mythological or past settings that call into question the value of poetry in the mid-eighteenth century. As a result, his works have not generally been subject to historicist criticism, nor given much prominence in studies of public verse in the long eighteenth century. Though his extensive letters have long been available in well-edited modern editions, his diffident manner and generally quiet life have also tended to produce equally modest biographies.

The six works under discussion all present significant cases for breaking with this governing tradition of scholarship on Gray and, in a larger view, with the assumptions of quietism or aesthetic isolation from history that have characterized discussion of much mid-to-late eighteenth-century poetry. Mack has compiled the most comprehensive biography to date on Gray, often reconstructing the quotidian episodes in the poet's life with journalistic fidelity and atmospheric detail. Gleckner offers "something like a psychobiography" (16) of Gray's career and arranges his study around the "double narrative" (7) of the poet's ambitious struggle to confront Miltonic influence as well as the force of his unresolved feelings for Richard West, his Eton schoolmate and fellow poet who died of consumption at the age of...