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“Artful Strife”: Conflict in Gray's Poetry

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Patricia Meyer Spaces*
Affiliation:
Wellesley College, Wellesley, Mass.

Extract

Thomas Gray's Pindaric ode, “The Progress of Poesy,” completed in 1754, concludes with an odd definition of the “way” of the poet:

Beyond the limits of a vulgar fate,

Beneath the Good how far—but far above the Great.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1966

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References

1 [Joseph Warton], An Essay on the Genius and Writings of Pope, 2 vols. (London, 1782), ii, 42.

2 Vol. xvii, 1757; in The Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Peter Cunningham, 4 vols. (London, 1854), iv, 317.

3 xciv (1853), 1–48.

4 “Gray,” Lives of the English Poets, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1905), iii, 440.

5 Essai sur Thomas Gray (London and Paris: Oxford Univ. Press and Les Presses Univ. de France, 1934), p. 448.

6 “The Two Voices of Gray,” Essays in Criticism, xiii (1963), 222–230.

7 13 January 1758, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Paget Toynbee and Leonard Whibley, 3 vols. (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1935), ii, 551.

8 8 January 1759, Correspondence, ii, 608.

9 “From Action to Image: Theories of the Lyric in the Eighteenth Century.” Critics and Criticism, Ancient and Modern, ed. R. S. Crane (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1952), p. 408.

10 “On Poetry, As Distinguished from Other Writing,” British Magazine, 1761–63; doubtfully attributed to Goldsmith and printed in his Works, iii, 309–310.

11 “The Two Voices of Gray,” e.g., pp. 223–224.

12 11 June 1757; Correspondence, ii, 504.

13 Quoted by Martin, p. 457.

14 George N. Shuster, The English Ode from Milton to Keats (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1940), p. 211.

15 The Sister Arts: The Tradition of Literary Pictorialism and English Poetry from Dryden to Gray (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 302.

16 Essai sur Gray, p. 350.

17 To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday, 1954), p. 342.

18 The note was copied by Mason from Gray's pocketbook; it is printed in The Poems of Gray and Collins, ed. Austin Lane Poole (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), p. 142.

19 English Poetry: A Critical Introduction (London: Longmans, Green, 1950), pp. 181–193.

20 “Gray's Storied Urn,” The Well-Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (New York: Harcourt, Brace [A Harvest Book], n.d.), pp. 105–123. First published 1947.

21 The Sister Arts, p. 301.

22 See Brooks, passim.

23 Brooks suggests that it becomes, “in association with Science, a kind of wisdom which allows him to see through the vanities which delude the Proud.” Well-Wrought Urn, p. 120.