Selected Bibliography:
Thomas Gray
(1716-1771)

By Alan T. McKenzie,
Purdue University,
and
B. Eugene McCarthy,
College of the Holy Cross

Last revised 14 December 2001

Bibliographies

• Clark S. Northup, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1917; facsim. reprint, New York: Russell & Russell, 1970).
• Herbert W. Starr, A Bibliography of Thomas Gray, 1917-1951 (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1953; facsim. reprint, New York: Kraus Reprint, 1969).
• Alan T. McKenzie, Thomas Gray: A Reference Guide (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1982).
• Donald C. Mell, Jr., "Thomas Gray 1716-71," in his English Poetry, 1660-1800: A Guide to Information Sources (Detroit: Gale Research, 1982), pp. 238-51.
• Wallace Jackson, "Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 - 30 July 1771)," in Eighteenth-Century British Poets, Second Series, ed. John Sitter (Detroit, London: Gale Research, 1999), pp. 168-82.
• Poetic Commonplace Books and Manuscripts of Thomas Gray, 1716-1771, from Pembroke College, Cambridge (Reading: Adam Matthew Publications, 1991 — http://www.adam-matthew-publications.co.uk/collect/p231.htm). 14 microfilm reels plus a guide.
• Margaret Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts. Vol. 3, 1700-1800, part 2, John Gay-Ambrose Phillips (London and New York: Mansell, 1989).

Editions

• Collected Works

  • The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray: English, Latin and Greek, ed. Herbert W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966; reprinted, 1972). Definitive texts, with brief annotations.
  • The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Roger Lonsdale, Longmans' Annotated English Poets (London: Longmans, Green, 1969). Slightly modernized texts, with fine headnotes and highly literate footnotes.
  
  

• Early Editions

  • An Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College (London: R. Dodsley, 1747).
  • A Collection of Poems: By Several Hands, vol. 2, (London: R. Dodsley, 1748). Includes 3 Odes.
  • An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (London: R. Dodsley, 1751).
  • Designs by Mr. R. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray (London: R. Dodsley, 1753). The illustrations are particularly fine.
  • Odes, by Mr. Gray (Strawberry-Hill: R. and J. Dodsley, 1757).
  • Poems by Mr. Gray (London: J. Dodsley, 1768).
  • Poems by Mr. Gray (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1768).
  • The Poems of Mr. Gray. To which are prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings by W. Mason, M.A. (York: A. Ward, 1775).
  
  

• Correspondence

  • The Correspondence of Thomas Gray, 3 vols., ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1935; reprinted, with additions and corrections by Herbert W. Starr, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
  • R. W. Ketton-Kremer, "The Poet Who Spoke Out: The Letters of Thomas Gray," in The Familiar Letter in the Eighteenth Century, ed. Howard Anderson, Irvin Ehrenpreis, and Philip Daghlian (Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1966). Surveys various editions and classifies and appraises the five hundred surviving letters.
  • Horace Walpole's Correspondence with Thomas Gray, Richard West and Thomas Ashton, ed. W. S. Lewis, George L. Lam and Charles H. Bennett, The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole's Correspondence, vols. 13-14 (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1948).
  • W. G. Roberts, "A Letter from Thomas Gray to Horace Walpole," Notes & Queries 47, no. 245 (2000): 198-201. Authenticates letter dated 9 April, probably 1751, to Walpole; another to Walpole is "unlikely" to be Gray's.
  • See also Ian Jack, in Fearful Joy (1974), below under Criticism — Collections.
  
  

• Archives and Depositories

  • The library of Pembroke College, Cambridge University holds three volumes of Gray's Common Place Books, his "Pocket Books" for 1755 and 1760, two miscellaneous boxes of materials, and autograph notes for an oratorio version of The Bard. One manuscript version of The Elegy is in the Common Place Books; there are two others, one at Eton College and one in the British Library. The Lewis Walpole Library (Yale University) in Farmington, Conn., holds ten volumes of manuscript musical transcriptions, chiefly of Italian composers. For a detailed listing, see Margaret Smith, Index of English Literary Manuscripts, above under Bibliographies.
  
  

Biographies

• Robert L. Mack, Thomas Gray: A Life (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 2000). Concerned with Gray's character and personality, his formative activities and friendships, and his career as poet.
• A. Lytton Sells and Iris Esther Robertson Sells, Thomas Gray, His Life and Works (London: Allen & Unwin, 1980). Wonders why Gray published so little; denies him a significant place among the pre-romantics.
• Robert W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1955). Especially good on the details of Gray's life at Cambridge and his relations with Walpole; lingers over Bonstetten.
• Lord David Cecil, Two Quiet Lives: Dorothy Osborne, Thomas Gray (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1948), pp. 106-256. Gray's academic and artistic temperaments combined nicely with his reserve.
• Alastair Macdonald, "Thomas Gray: An Uncommitted Life," The [Canadian] Humanities Association Bulletin 13 (1963): 13-25. On the privacies, scholarship, humor, and silences in that life.

Criticism

• Reference Works

  • Wallace Jackson, "Thomas Gray," Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume One Hundred Nine: Eighteenth-Century British Poets, ed. John Sitter (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 1991), pp. 168-82.
  • Albert S. Cook, Concordance to the English Poems of Thomas Gray (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1908; facsim. reprint, Folcroft, PA: Folcroft Library Editions, 1974).
  
  

• Collections

  • Harold Bloom, ed., Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," Modern Critical Interpretations (New York: Chelsea House, 1987). Reprints nine essays (without footnotes) 1965-85, with brief appraisal of the poem, attention to Gray's precursors.
  • Harold Bloom, ed., Poets of Sensibility and the Sublime, Modern Critical Views (New York: Chelsea House, 1986). Reprints essays by Fry (1980), Sacks (1985), and Mileur (1985).
  • W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick, eds., Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, Liverpool English Texts and Studies (Liverpool: Liverpool Univ. Press, 1993). Includes:
    • Bernard Beatty, "Unheard Voices, Indistinct Visions: Gray and Byron," pp. 224-47. Seeks the "ground of connection" between Gray and Byron; while their "differences are huge" Byron is drawn to and his poetry influenced by Gray's sentiment and his diction.
    • Angus Easson, "'A Man of Genius': Gray and Wordsworth," pp. 205-23. Wordsworth owes more to Gray than his critique of the Sonnet suggests.
    • David Fairer, "Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, and the Recovery of the Past," pp. 146-70. To oppose some ideas of "preromanticism," argues that Warton is not influenced by the past but absorbs it and recovers it, whereas Gray sees discontinuities with it.
    • Malcolm Hicks, "Gray among the Victorians," pp. 248-69. The Victorians' opinion was more comprehensive than Arnold's remark on Gray's not speaking out: includes a wide range of poets, writers, and Gray scholars.
    • W. B. Hutchings, "Thomas Gray: Past Criticism and the Present Volume," pp. 1-12.
    • Anne McDermott, "The 'Wonderful Wonder of Wonders': Gray's Odes and Johnson's Criticism," pp. 188-204. Johnson's differences with Gray's poetry focus on the nature of the language of poetry.
    • Vincent Newey, "The Selving of Thomas Gray," pp. 13-38. In his "quest for identity" in the Elegy Gray "wishes to be seen as an exemplary . . . figure," but "could not break . . . the constant cycle of making and unmaking the self." Also in his Centring the Self: Subjectivity, Society and Reading from Thomas Gray to Thomas Hardy (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995), pp. 1-18.
    • William Ruddick, "Thomas Gray's Travel Writing," pp. 126-45. The development from early travel descriptions to Gray's late trips to the Lakes, where he combined sublime and picturesque styles and thus became "one of the first significant British travel writers."
    • Richard Terry, "Gray and Poetic Diction," pp. 73-110. History of poetic diction and examination of the diction in several poems.
    • Paul Whiteley, "Gray, Akenside and the Ode," pp. 171-87. The differences between the two poets.
    • Paul Williamson, "Gray's Elegy and the Logic of Expression," pp. 39-72. Sees the original version of the Elegy as Christian, the final version as classical, logical, non-Christian, without resurrection, in relation to graveyard poetry and Virgil.
    
    
  • Fearful Joy: Papers from the Thomas Gray Bicentenary Conference at Carleton Univ., ed. James Downey and Ben Jones (Montreal: McGill-Queen's Univ. Press, 1974). A fine collection, containing such very important essays as:
    • Jean Hagstrum, "Gray's Sensibility," pp. 6-19.
    • Ian Jack, "Gray in his Letters," pp. 20-36.
    • Roger Lonsdale, "Gray and Johnson: The Biographical Problem," pp. 66-84.
    • James Steele, "Thomas Gray and the Season for Triumph," pp. 198-240.
    • Clarence Tracy, "Melancholy Marked Him for Her Own," pp. 37-49.
    • George Whalley, "Thomas Gray: A Quiet Hellenist," pp. 146-71.
    
    
  • Herbert W. Starr, ed., Twentieth Century Interpretations of Gray's Elegy: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1968). Reprints 12 good essays, including those listed below by Brooks (1947), and Ellis (1951), and Jack (1965).
  
  

• General, after 1950

  • George E. Haggerty, "'What Is This Secret Sin?' Sexuality and Secrecy in the Writings of Horace Walpole," in Passionate Encounters in a Time of Sensibility, ed. Maximillian E. Novak and Anne Mellor (Newark: Delaware Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 2000), pp. 127-49. Defines an idea of love with examples from Gray's "love letters" to Walpole.
  • Heidi Thomson, "The Poet and the Publisher in Thomas Gray's Correspondence," Yearbook of English Studies 28 (1998): 163-80. To counter the impression that Gray shunned publication, finds evidence in the correspondence that he "dearly loved to be read," "controlled most publication decisions," and though difficult with publishers, was involved at every step in publication of his poems.
  • Ian Britain, "From the Sublime to the Pastoral: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Gothic in English Ideas of Landscape," in History on the Edge: Essays in Memory of John Foster (1944-1994), ed. Mark Baker (Melbourne: Univ. of Melbourne Press, 1997), pp. 9-43. In the context of "shifting ideas about the relationship between Gothic architectural styles and English places," carefully surveys the "domestication" of Gothic with emphasis on the images of Eton in Gray's ode.
  • Robert F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1997). Within the "powerful and moving coherence" of his "brilliant poetic . . . strategies," Gray explores two narratives: the pressure of Milton's achievement, and his own involvement with Richard West, both concerns discernible in silence or encoded language — what Gray does not say.
  • George E. Haggerty, "'O Lachrymarum Fons': Tears, Poetry, and Desire in Gray," Eighteenth Century Studies, 30 (1996): 81-95. Gray fashions his "male-male desire" within the melancholic framework the culture provides.
  • Jerome McGann, "Thomas Gray's 'Thoughts, that Breathe, and Words, that Burn,'" in his The Poetics of Sensibility: A Revolution in Literary Style (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996), pp. 24-32. "De Principiis" was the "model for literature of sensibility" with its emphasis on the tactile, central to Gray's poetry.
  • William Levine, "'Beyond the Limits of a Vulgar Fate': The Renegotiation of Public and Private Concerns in the Careers of Gray and Other Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poets," Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 24 (1995): 223-42. Gray (and other "poets of sensibility," like Smart) sought "to uphold a purified notion" of poetry, a "socially responsive basis of poetic power," and a "correspondence of poetic form to social function."
  • Felicity Rosslyn, "Good Humour and the Agelasts: Horace, Pope and Gray," in Horace Made New: Horatian Influences on British Writing from the Renaissance to the Twentieth Century, ed. Charles Martindale and David Hopkins (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 184-98. An "agelast" is one who separates humor from seriousness; prefers Johnson's verdict that Gray's cat ode is a mere trifle and The Bard a humorless failure at sublimity.
  • Linda Zionkowski, "Gray, the Marketplace, and the Masculine Poet," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature & the Arts 35 (1993): 589-608. As the book trade compromised poets' "authority and masculinity," Gray's career "illustrates these . . . tensions" as he attempted "to resist . . . sexual and economic models of authorship."
  • Raymond Bentman, "Thomas Gray and the Poetry of 'Hopeless Love,'" Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1992): 203-22. Gray's attachment to West, contemporaneous reaction to sodomy, and evidence in the poems of Gray's love, and fear about homosexuality.
  • Rodney S. Edgecombe, Wonted Fires: A Reading of Thomas Gray, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment, 111 (Lewiston, N.Y.: Mellon Press; Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1992). Gray's early poems are Augustan — Gray stands "at a point of transition of major poetic trends," with the two versions of the Elegy pointing either to Pope or Wordsworth, and the odes "rendering the sublime."
  • William Epstein, "Professing Gray: The Resumption of Authority in Eighteenth-Century Studies," in The Profession of Eighteenth-Century Literature: Reflections on an Institution, ed. Leopold Damrosch and Marshall Brown (Madison: Univ. of Wisconsin Press, 1992), pp. 84-94. Critics "repossess" texts (authors, genres, etc.) from other critics and position ourselves by not appearing to do so; our critical "gestures" are tactics by which we "authorize" our interpretations.
  • Suvir Kaul, Thomas Gray and Literary Authority: A Study in Ideology and Poetics (Stanford: Stanford Univ. Press, 1992). Gray's poems "reproduce, and also produce, the socio-cultural and literary practices of their day"; they reflect "contradictory vocational attractions between public and private" and witness "the poet's need for appropriate social, political and ideological positions" by which to establish "poetic and cultural authority."
  • S. H. Clark, "'Pendet Homo Incertus': Gray's Response to Locke, I: 'Dull in a New Way' & II: 'De Principiis Cogitandi,'" Eighteenth-Century Studies 24 (1991): 273-91; 484-503. An extended two-part examination of Gray's major poems, which are rather passive in the face of Locke, whereas in the freer Latin poems and "De Principiis" Gray rises to the challenge of the Lockean inheritance.
  • Linda Zionkowski, "Bridging the Gulf Between: The Poet and the Audience in the Work of Gray," ELH 58 (1991): 331-50. Gray's reluctance to publish was not due to shyness but to "discomfort with the contemporary system of literature," anxiety about the poet's function in a time of "commodified texts," and "pessimism about the future of literature" and loss of intimate readership.
  • B. Eugene McCarthy, Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet (Madison, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson Univ. Press; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1997). On the composition of the poems, with special attention to prosody, in the context of Gray's biography, correspondence, notebooks, and study, to reveal the coherent development of his career; chapters on translations, early poems, the Elegy, odes, and final poems.
  • Martin Price, "Sacred to Secular: Thomas Gray and the Cultivation of the Literary," in Context, Influence, and Mid-Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Maximillian E. Novak. (Los Angeles: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1990), pp. 41-78. Traces Gray's search for a new language, from diction which reflects the Augustans to a "primitivism" in the Pindarics which is "beyond Christianity, classical myth, or history."
  • W. B. Carnochan, "The Continuity of Eighteenth-Century Poetry: Gray, Cowper, Crabbe, and the Augustans," Eighteenth-Century Life 12 (1988): 119-27. To avoid divisions of the eighteenth century into Augustan and Later, suggests continuities: Gray with Augustans (satire, etc.), Cowper with Crabbe.
  • Wallace Jackson, "Thomas Gray and the Dedicatory Muse," ELH 54 (1987): 277-98. Gray is "the most disappointing poet" of the century because "he could not fully serve the muse of his own dedication"; and though the poets of the Elegy and The Bard are "antithetical voices," in the last poems Gray reaches a point "beyond which his vision does not go."
  • Wallace Jackson, "Thomas Gray: Drowning in Human Voices," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature & the Arts 28 (1986): 361-77. In the face of many analyses of Gray's "two voices," places Gray's poetry as "progress pieces" in the "logic of Poesy's westward movement," but which often looked backward to what was closed, thus a progress Gray largely evades.
  • Margaret Anne Doody, The Daring Muse: Augustan Poetry Reconsidered (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985). Treatment of Gray's poems passim, e.g., in the Elegy death is a "move to oblivion."
  • Jean-Pierre Mileur, Literary Revisionism and the Burden of Modernity (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1985), pp. 197-211; reprinted in Bloom (1986), pp. 125-36, and Bloom (1987), pp. 119-30. Gray is said to question the permanence of poetry and poetic fame; The Bard is "allegory of originality as disaster," his "Progress" "fails," his verse is "pedantic rather than imaginative."
  • Fredric V. Bogel, Literature and Insubstantiality in Later Eighteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1984). Passim references to Gray's relation to past, "human need for images of the past," in, e.g., The Bard.
  • Paul H. Fry, "Thomas Gray's Feather'd Cincture," in his The Poet's Calling in the English Ode (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 63-96. The textuality of the odes is an emblem of the isolation and alienation of the poet.
  • Patricia M. Spacks, "Thomas Gray: Action and Image," in The Poetry of Vision: Five Eighteenth-Century Poets (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1967), pp. 90-118. Close reading for artifice, distancing rhetoric, and the role of the poet.
  • Morris Golden, Thomas Gray, Twayne's English Authors Series, No. 6 (New York: Twayne, 1964; "updated edition," 1988). A good general introduction.
  • Francis Doherty, "The Two Voices of Gray," Essays in Criticism 13 (July 1963): 222-30. The public voice is scholarly and excessively refined; the personal genteel and sad.
  • Geoffrey Tillotson, "More About Poetic Diction," in his Augustan Studies (London: Athlone, 1961), pp. 46-110. Demonstrates the cleverness and learning in Gray's diction and descriptions.
  • Jean Hagstrum, "Thomas Gray," in The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 287-314. Visual details in the Elegy and The Bard evoke the themes and images of earlier Roman and Bolognese painters.
  • Norman Maclean, "From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century," in Critics and Criticism: Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), pp. 408-60. Critical analysis of several odes; The Bard is both traditional and an utterance of the poet's soul.
  
  

• The Elegy

  • George E. Haggerty, "Desire and Mourning: The Ideology of the Elegy," in Ideology and Form in Eighteenth-Century Literature, ed. David H. Richter (Lubbock: Texas Tech Univ. Press, 1999), pp. 185-206. Examines the complex problems of mourning; in the Elegy the promised elegiac consolation is only of "loss and repression."
  • Lorna Clymer, "Graved in Tropes: The Figural Logic of Epitaphs and Elegies in Blair, Gray, Cowper, and Wordsworth," ELH 62 (1995): 347-86. The Elegy "follows the conventions of the epitaph" from the opening where the narrator speaks of himself in the second person to the end, where the reader is "written into the very epitaph he now reads."
  • R. J. Ellis, "Plodding Plowmen: Issues of Labour and Literacy in Gray's 'Elegy,'" in The Independent Spirit: John Clare and the Self-Taught Tradition, ed. John Goodridge (Helpston, U.K.: John Clare Society & the Margaret Grainger Memorial Trust, 1994), pp. 27-43. Examines possible identity of "thee," sees historical context as encroachment of enclosure acts (note weary farmers) and social movement out of illiteracy ("thou cans't read").
  • Adam Potkay, "Gray's Elegy: Between Civic Applause and the Cool Vale," in The Fate of Eloquence in the Age of Hume (Ithaca and London: Cornell Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 134-42. Gray seems not concerned to revivify past eloquence.
  • Antonio Illiano, "From Gray's Elegy to Foscolo's Carne: Highlighting the Mediation and Sublimation of the 'Sepulchral,'" Symposium: A Quarterly Journal in Modern Foreign Literatures 47 (1993): 117-31. Among eighteenth-century translators of the Elegy the best, Cesarotti, mediates the poem into a "new literary climate," a process culminating in Foscolo's Dei Sepolcri (1807).
  • George E. Haggerty, "'The Voice of Nature' in Gray's Elegy," in Homosexuality in Renaissance and Enlightenment England: Literary Representations in Historical Context, ed. Claude J. Summers (New York: Haworth Press, 1992), 199-214. The poet is aware of his homosexuality in the poem and at the end inscribes "his gay identity" in the epitaph.
  • Andrew Dillon, "Depression and Release: The Journey of the Spirit in Thomas Gray's 'Elegy,'" North Dakota Quarterly 60 (1992): 128-34. The Elegy as "symbolic self-destruction."
  • William Epstein, "Assumed Identities: Gray's Correspondence and the 'Intelligence Communities' of Eighteenth-Century Studies," The Eighteenth Century: Theory & Interpretation 32 (1991): 274-88. Finds a correspondence between the "trope of counter-intelligence in cold-war criticism" and Gray's "under cover" correspondence with Walpole.
  • Peter Huhn, "Outwitting Self-Consciousness: Self-Reference and Paradox in Three Romantic Poems," English Studies 72 (1991): 230-45. Though self-analysis ("motivating features of English Romantic poetry") does not in the Elegy cause "sterility," the self is self-centered, self-conscious, and isolated.
  • Henry Weinfield, The Poet without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 1991). The "problem of history" is the "double or circular metaphor" of the "utopian impulse toward perfection" reflected in pastoral; the Elegy represents "symbolic dissolution of the pastoral." Two chapters examine the problem of evaluation and interpretation, chapter three provides a reading of the poem, the last two discuss the dissolution of pastoral and Wordsworth's reconstitution of it.
  • Richard C. Sha, "Gray's Political Elegy: Poetry as the Burial of History," Philological Quarterly 69 (1990): 337-57. Raises issues about "the poor" that Gray does not raise: such as charity, education, and leisure.
  • Torsten Pettersson, Literary Interpretation: Current Models and a New Departure (Turku: Abo Akad., 1988). Tests the "acceptability" of four interpretations of the Elegy: Lonsdale (1973), Weinbrot (1978), Logsdon (1973), and Wright (1977).
  • Stephen Bygrave, "Gray's 'Elegy': Inscribing the Twilight," in Post-Structuralist Readings of English Poetry, ed. Richard Machin and Christopher Norris (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1987), pp. 162-75. Reads the Elegy as filled with discrete tensions, problems, displacements, uncertainties, and the poet's inability.
  • Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1985), pp. 133-37. The poet mourns his own death as well as that of villagers; Gray's "superb accomplishment" is "contriving an action within the poem in which the epitaph is actually to be read." Also in Bloom (1986), pp. 119-23 and (1987), pp. 131-35.
  • W. B. Hutchings, "Syntax of Death: Instability in Gray's 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,'" Studies in Philology 81 (1984): 496-514. The "extraordinary degree of instability" in the syntax of the poem is the key to its meaning: the "subject [poet] dissolves into an object [of contemplation]" to create an audience who will continue the poet's life after his "death." Also in Bloom (1987), pp. 83-99.
  • Virgil Nemoianu, "Societal Models as Substitute Reality in Literature," Poetics Today 5 (1984): 275-97. What is the relationship "between reality and its simplified representations" such as the world without extremes depicted in the Elegy?
  • Anne Williams, Prophetic Strain: The Greater Lyric in the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1984). Recognizes "movements of a particularized and precisely located consciousness" in the Elegy. There are three poems: a graveyard meditation, a reflection on the desire to be remembered, an elegy proper: all conclude with the epitaph. Also in Bloom (1987), pp. 101-17.
  • Howard D. Weinbrot, "Gray's Elegy: A Poem of Moral Choice and Resolution," Studies in English Literature, 18 (1978): 537-51. The choice is of eternity.
  • George T. Wright, "Stillness and the Argument of Gray's Elegy," Modern Philology 74 (1977): 381-89. Grammatical devices in the poem explore "stillness," proving that "epitaphs are superfluous."
  • Alistair MacDonald, ed., Thomas Gray: An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard, The Eton Manuscript & The First Edition (Ilkey, Yorkshire: Scolar Press). The Introduction describes the manuscripts and printed text in detail; includes a transcription and facsimile.
  • Richard Logsdon, "Gray's 'Elegy': The Structure and the Poet," Essays in Literature 2 (1973): 1-19. The poet's mind moves "from an emotional affinity with the dead to an imagined union with them."
  • Roger Lonsdale, "The Poetry of Thomas Gray: Versions of Self," Chatterton Lecture on an English Poet, Proceedings of the British Academy 59 (1973): 105-23. Excessive sensibility and self-absorption may be being called into question.
  • Frank Brady, "Structure and Meaning in Gray's Elegy," in From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965), pp. 177-189. Contrasting views of the narrator.
  • Bertrand H. Bronson, "On a Special Decorum in Gray's Elegy," in From Sensibility to Romanticism (above), pp. 171-76. A close paraphrase, attentive to the egocentricity.
  • Ian Jack, "Gray's Elegy Reconsidered," in From Sensibility to Romanticism (above), pp. 139-69. Considers the spontaneity, the meter, the stanza, and the personifications; doubts the biographical connections.
  • Frank H. Ellis, "Gray's Elegy: The Biographical Problem in Literary Criticism," PMLA 66 (December 1951): 971-1008. Biographical interpretation, positing the presence of a "Stonecutter poet."
  • F. W. Bateson, "Gray's Elegy Reconsidered," in his English Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), pp. 181-93. Prefers the early version, dismissing the later 56 lines as irrelevant and conventional.
  • Francis Stokes, ed., An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard by Thomas Gray (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1929). Careful review of the composition, manuscripts, publication, and early editions, transcribing the manuscripts.
  
  

• Other Poems

  • Miscellaneous

    • Paul Odney, "Thomas Gray's 'Daring Spirit': Forging the Poetics of an Alternative Nationalism," CLIO 28 (1999): 245-60. Gray's two odes contrast classical and native traditions, weaving "myth and history" to show an "alternative nationalism."
    • Frederick N. Keener, "Gray's Pindaric Odes and the Availability of Literary Interpretation in the Eighteenth Century," Studies on Voltaire & the Eighteenth Century 304 (1992): 1101-04. What "in the way of interpreters and interpretations of contemporary literature was available in Gray's time?"
    • Rodney S. Edgecombe, "Diction and Allusion in Two Early Odes by Gray," Durham University Journal (1986): 31-36. Poetic diction and allusion in "Spring" and Eton.
    • Howard D. Weinbrot, "Gray's 'Progress of Poesy' and 'The Bard': An Essay in Literary Transmission," in Johnson and His Age, ed. James Engell (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1984), pp. 311-32; also in his Britannia's Issue: the Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1993), pp. 384-401. Considers the odes as sisters, "both original and traditional in almost any positive sense"; along with earlier English writers' confident revision of the past, Gray accommodates the Pindaric to British history and literature.
    • W. B. Hutchings, "Conversations with a Shadow: Thomas Gray's Latin Poems to Richard West," Studies in Philology 92 (1995): 118-39. Latin, the "language of the dead," was Gray's "most intimate form of communication with" West; a thorough examination of the Latin poems with attention to sources, especially Horace, and Gray's concern with audience, concluding with "De Principiis" and English poems about West.
    • Barry Baldwin, "On Some Greek and Latin Poems by Thomas Gray," International Journal of the Classic Tradition 1 (1994): 71-88. Detailed evidence and analysis of Gray's borrowing from classical sources.
    • Deborah D. Rogers, "The Problem of Copy-Texts for Gray's Epitaph on Mrs. Clerke," English Language Notes 26 (1988): 30-34.
    • Heidi Van de Veire, "A Note on Gray's 'Adversity,'" Notes & Queries 37, no. 235 (1990): 309-12. The title differs between "ode" and "hymn"; Gray preferred the former.
    
    

  • Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College

    • Marshall Brown, "The Urbane Sublime," ELH 45 (1978): 236-54. The Eton ode has that "urbanity" and "discretion" which mark the urban sublime; reprinted in Modern Essays in Eighteenth Century Literature, ed. Leopold Damrosch, Jr., (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), pp. 436-54.
    
    

  • "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West"

    • Donald C. Mell, Jr., "Allusion and Elegiac Form in Thomas Gray's Sonnet 'On the Death of Richard West,'" in his Poetics of Augustan Elegy: Studies of Poems by Dryden, Pope, Prior, Swift, Gray, and Johnson (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1974), pp. 63-76. The Miltonic context and complications in sources and tone render the sonnet both a tribute and a consolation.
    
    

  • Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat

    • Suvir Kaul, "Why Selima Drowns: Thomas Gray and the Domestication of the Imperial Ideal," PMLA 105 (1990): 223-32; incorporated into his Thomas Gray and Literary Authority (1992), pp. 165-85. Part of his century's "attack on luxury," female desire is allied to Britain's imperial desire.
    • Mark Lussier, "The Contra-Diction of Design: Blake's Illustrations to Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,'" Visible Language 23 (1989): 205-19. Where Gray's words "restrain desire," the designs "work to liberate desire." Blake uncovers and reverses (in Lacanian terms) Gray's phallocentric aesthetic.
    • Robert Pattison, "Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat': A Rationalist's Aesthetic," University of Toronto Quarterly 49 (1979): 156-65. A study of its sources reveals that the poem concerns itself with the workings of a Lockean mind.
    • Geoffrey Tillotson, "Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat . . .,'" in his Augustan Studies (London: Athlone, 1961), pp. 216-23. On the mock-heroic elements embedded in the poem, as well as Johnson's misreadings of it.
    
    

  • The Bard

    • Charles Hinnant, "Changing Perspectives on the Past: The Reception of Thomas Gray's The Bard," Clio 3 (1974): 315-29. The poet's enthusiasm for the history of the Tudors troubled Gray's contemporaries.
    • Arthur Johnston, Thomas Gray and the Bard: An Inaugural Lecture Delivered at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, Wednesday, 2nd February, 1966 (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 1966). Considers the poem's difficulties, fusions, and prophecies.
    • B. Eugene McCarthy, "Gray's Music for 'The Bard,'" Review of English Studies 189 (1997): 19-32. The manuscript of Gray's oratorio version of the ode with directions for musical forms and models (not notation).
    • Giuseppe Galigani, Tra poesia e pittura: Il Bardo di Thomas Gray e le arti figurative (Parma: Pratiche, 1995). Source illustrations (e.g. Raphael), and works of Bentley, Blake, de Louthenbourg, Martin, among others.
    
    

  • The Progress of Poesy

    • Wallace Jackson and Paul Yoder, "Gray's Pindarics: Teaching The Progress of Poesy," in Teaching Eighteenth-Century Poetry, ed. Christopher Fox (New York: AMS Press, 1990), pp. 303-17. The poem concerns the "English place in European literary history" and "the poet's place in England"; explicates "Progress" and considers its place in Gray's career.
    • William Levine, "From the Ridiculous to the Sublime: Gray's Transvaluation of Pope's Poetics," Philological Quarterly 70 (1991): 289-309. The poem strongly echoes Pope's Dunciad in order to "render acceptable answers to virtually all . . . violations" of diction, genre, and rhetoric that Pope cites.
    
    
  
  

• Influential General Criticism to 1950

  • William Mason, ed., The Poems of Mr. Gray, to which are Prefixed Memoirs of his Life and Writings by W. Mason, M.A. (York: A. Ward, 1775). Annotates the letters and comments on the poems.
  • Samuel Johnson, "Gray," Prefaces, Biographical and Critical, to the Works of the English Poets, vol. 10 (London: J. Nichols, 1781); reprinted as "Life of Thomas Gray," in Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), 3:421-45. Blunt, unsympathetic, and intelligent, thus still provocative.
  • William Wordsworth, "Preface," Lyrical Ballads, with Other Poems, 2nd ed. (London: Longman and Rees, 1800), 1:xxiv-xxv; frequently reprinted. The diction in the "Sonnet on the Death of Mr. Richard West" is too elaborate.
  • John Mitford, "Essay on the Poetry of Gray," in his Poems of Thomas Gray (London: White, Chochrane, 1814), pp. cxi-clxxxiv. Good on Gray's method of composition and cadences; dwells on The Bard.
  • Robert Willmott, "Gray and Mason: A Summer Day with the Muses," in his Conversations at Cambridge (London: John W. Parker, 1836), pp. 160-218. An imaginary dialogue, which deserves to be better known.
  • Matthew Arnold, "Thomas Gray," in The English Poets: Selections with Critical Introductions by Various Writers, ed. Thomas Humphry Ward (London: Macmillan, 1880), 3:302-16; frequently reprinted. Regrettably influential variations on the phrase "he never spoke out."
  • Leslie Stephen, "Hours in a Library: No. XXI — Gray and His School," Cornhill Magazine 40 (July, 1879): 70-91. The poet is an isolated phenomenon; the man was never in harmony with his surroundings at Cambridge.
  • Edmund Gosse, Gray, English Men of Letters, ed. John Morley (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1882). Sympathetic glimpses of Gray's uneventful life.
  • Odell Shepard, "A Youth to Fortune and to Fame Unknown," Modern Philology 20 (1923): 347-73. Reviews the evidence for the identity of the "youth," deciding that he was Richard West.
  • Amy L. Reed, The Background of Gray's Elegy: A Study in the Taste for Melancholy poetry, 1700-1751, Columbia University Studies in English & Comparative Literature, 35 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1924). Gray's melancholy is ripe, lovely, and humane.
  • John W. Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1929). Discusses Gray's classicism and traces numerous aspects of the elegiac tradition.
  • Roger Martin, Essai sur Thomas Gray (Paris: Les Presses Univ. de France, 1934). Early psychological scrutiny of Gray's inspiration and melancholy.
  • William Powell Jones, Thomas Gray, Scholar: The True Tragedy of an Eighteenth-Century Gentleman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1937). Still essential for the studious Gray.
  • Lord David Cecil, "The Poetry of Thomas Gray," Warton Lecture on English Poetry, Proceedings of the British Academy 31 (1945): 43-60; reprinted several times. Bases the discussion on Gray's complex, but disciplined, personality.
  • Herbert W. Starr, "Gray's Craftsmanship," JEGP 45 (1946): 415-29. Detailed study of Gray's "painstaking" revisions.
  • Cleanth Brooks, "Gray's Storied Urn," in his Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Reynal and Hitchcock, 1947), pp. 96-113. The allusions, paradoxes, and ironic contrasts form the poem itself into the poet's storied urn.
  
  

• Miscellaneous

  • Marion Roberts, "Thomas Gray's Contribution To the Study of Medieval Architecture," Architectural History 36 (1993): 49-68. An important study of significance of Gray's impressive knowledge and sophisticated means of analysis (with plates).
  • Loftus Jestin, The Answer to the Lyre: Richard Bentley's Illustrations for Thomas Gray's Poems (Philadelphia: Univ. of Pennsylvania Press, 1990). A facsimile of Bentley's impressive illustrations to six of Gray's poems (1753), with discussion of Bentley's art, the sequence, disposition, and imagery in relation to poems; 118 other prints are appended to illustrate Bentley's work and the influence of others.
  • Poems by Mr. Gray/Drawings by William Blake (London: J. Murray, 1790; facsim. reprint London: Trianon Press, 1971). 116 stunning, but distracting, illustrations, most of specific lines.
  • William Blake and Thomas Gray, Blake's Water-Colours for the Poems of Thomas Gray: With Complete Texts (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, 2000). Color reproduction of Blake's 116 plates; no commentary.
  • Frank A. Vaughan, Again to the Life of Eternity: William Blake's Illustrations to the Poems of Thomas Gray (Selinsgrove PA: Susquehanna Univ. Press, 1996; London: Associated Univ. Presses, 1996). Reprints the illustrations in black and white, with a historical and critical introduction and discussion (139 pp.) of the thirteen poems.
  • Masashi Suzuki, "'Dust Thou Art': The Moment of Self-Portraiture in the Illustrations to Gray's Elegy," Shiron 37 (1998): 1-22. A well-informed examination of why Blake drew the "Here Lieth William Blake" epitaph into his illustration of the Elegy — part joke, part serious.
  • Richard E. Johnson, "Blake as Audience: The Designs to Gray's 'Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat,'" in Reconciliations: Studies in Honor of Richard Harter Fogle, ed. Mary Lynn Johnson and Seraphia D. Leyda (Salzburg: Institut für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 1983), pp. 72-94. Blake transplants Gray's text into "fertile soil of his own designs" to create "oppositions, or re-readings" but with friendly wit.
  • David Mannings, "Jonathan Richardson, Thomas Gray, and the Genealogy of Art," Journal of the History of Ideas 55 (1994): 405-20. On the principle of selection, and consequences for art history, in lists of artists by Richardson and Gray.
  • Occasional Memorandums: Being Extracts from a Journal for the Year 1767 Now First Printed from the Original Manuscripts of Thomas Gray, Introduction by Roger Senhouse (Stanford Dingly: The Mill House Press, 1950). Transcription of a brief diary recording travel expenses and observations of weather, flowers, and birds.
  • W. Powell Jones, "Thomas Gray's Library," Modern Philology 35 (1938): 257-78. Lists, from various sources, all the books Gray is known to have owned.
  • "Sale of the Library of Gray the Poet," Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 25 (1846): 29-33. An account of Gray's reading, reprinting many of his annotations.
  • Wilmarth S. Lewis, Collector's Progress (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1951). Anecdotes from the life of the great Walpole collector, mentioning many Gray items.
  
  

• Gray's Influence on Other Writers

  • Daniel E. White, "Autobiography and Elegy: The Early Romantic Poetics of Thomas Gray and Charlotte Smith," in Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (Basingstoke: Macmillan; New York: St. Martin's, 1998), pp. 57-69. On Smith's "appropriation" of Gray's "elegiac poetics"; whereas the "intertextual relationship between literary production and lived experience" is "encrypted" in Gray, it is explicit and "integral" in Smith.
  • Molly Anne Rothenberg, "Blake Reads 'The Bard": Contextual Displacement and Conditions of Readability," Studies in English Literature 27 (1987): 489-502. Gray's "eagle" signifies despair, Blake's "screaming eagle," liberation.
  • Eric Gidal, "Wordsworth's Art of Memory," Studies in Romanticism 37 (1998): 445-75. Wordsworth's use of the Eton ode.
  • Peter J. Manning, "Wordsworth and Gray's Sonnet on the Death of West," Studies in English Literature 22 (1982): 505-18. Reexamines the sonnet's diction and Wordsworth's poems (apart from his criticism of Gray). Also in Reading Romantics, Texts and Contexts (New York and Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990), pp. 53-67.
  • Wallace Jackson and Paul Yoder, "Wordsworth Reimagines Thomas Gray: Notations on Begetting a Kindred Spirit," Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature & the Arts 31 (1989): 287-300. To resolve tension between public and private voices, Gray explores the progress poem, a legacy Wordsworth deploys "as a composite generic form."
  • Rodney S. Edgecombe, "Gray, Hunt, Keats and the Idea of Artistic Succession," Keats-Shelley Journal 44 (1995): 17-21. Keats's possible connection to Gray's poems.
  • Graham Chesters, "A Political Reading of Baudelaire's 'L'artiste Inconnu' ('Le Guignon')," Modern Language Review 79 (1984): 64-76. Baudelaire "plagiarized" from the Elegy and other poems while reflecting on fame and politics.
  • D. S. Neff, "Phidias and the 'Runic Stone': Gray's 'Alcaic Ode' and 'Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse,'" Victorian Poetry 35 (1997): 543-50. Arnold's use of Gray's poem.
  • Dennis Taylor, "Thomas Hardy and Thomas Gray: The Poet's Currency," ELH 65 (1998): 451-77. Gray's "aestheticism and anxiety about public culture" were a "key" influence on Hardy's rating his own verse over his novels.
  • Roger Elliott, "The Bard as Moping Owl," The Cambridge Quarterly 15 (1986): 207-15. Philip Larkin's "Church Going" compared with the Elegy.
  • See also, for Wordsworth, Easson, and, for Byron, Beatty, in Hutchings (1993) above, in Criticism — Collections.
  
  

Electronic Resources

• http://www.thomasgray.org/materials/links.shtml — A fine site maintained by Alexander Huber at the State and University Library at Göttingen, with annotated texts of fourteen poems, a bibliography, commentaries, links, portraits, illustrations, etc.
• http://www.library.utoronto.ca/utel/rp/authors/gray.html — Reliable texts of nine poems.
• C18-L: The Selected Readings Page — Timely, wide-ranging, and reliable.

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