Thomas Gray

This book examines the whole body of work of the English poet Thomas Gray (1716-71) as a continuous development as poet. While it is not a biography, the study considers Gray's life in its examination of the poet's development. Author B. Eugene McCarthy studies Gray's correspondence, notebooks, and scholarship in order to read in effective context his poems - with attention to prosody - both in draft and in published forms. The study reveals that Gray has a great deal more purposeful design to his sense of himself as poet, scholar, and man than has previously been noticed. Gray manifested an increasingly coherent progress through his poetry, even in the apparently random notations in his commonplace notebooks, toward such culminating points as "The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "The Progress of Poesy," "The Bard," and his Welsh and Norse studies. The book is divided into five chapters. The first examines Gray's earliest poems and imitations for evidence of his sense of himself as poet, of prosody, diction, sources, or traditions to utilize. By chapter 2, Gray's impulses toward his goal as a poet become more evident, as he is manifestly determined toward a life of poetry. The "Elegy" occupies chapter 3 - his drafts and composition of the poem, and the poem itself, the resolution to his complex of problems as poet and as man. Close study of Gray's notebooks in chapter 4 shows that the Pindaric odes, "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard," though ostensibly radically different from the "Elegy," were conceived at the same time as the "Elegy" and thus draw crucial depictions of his movement toward serious revision of English poetic style and his own role as poet in society. Chapter 5 continues Gray's scholarly impulse that led to the study and imitation of Pindar, as he turned to Northern European sources for proof of poetic antiquity equal to the Greek. He found what he wanted in Welsh and Norse lore and wrote several poems imitating their style.