Thomas Gray: A Quiet Hellenist

As a rough old Coleridgean, with a palate a little coarse for Augustan nuances, I should offer my credentials before saying anything about Thomas Gray on so ceremonious an occasion.  I must admit that my cre­dentials are oblique, accidental, almost non-existent.  My concern for Thomas Gray springs from a curious tissue of circumstances of a kind that Gray himself might take for an omen, or that might – for its gos­sipy inconsequence – induce him (if indeed this is permitted by the gods) to smile a little from the shades like one of Richard Bentley’s cats. 

For a year I lived on the winding Thames between Bourne End and Cookham, near Maidenhead, on the edge of a ten-acre water-meadow that in the spring was full of the cries and wings of courting curlews.  Stanley Spencer was still painting in Cookham then; and at Cookham bridge we watched the Queen’s red-bearded Swan-master set out for the yearly Swan-upping – just as Stanley Spencer had painted it – in an oared boat under banners, the men in splendid livery; and in the village street you could see some of the people who on the Last Day (in another painting of Spencer’s) break out of their graves in the yew-lined churchyard of Cookham to greet their friends and lovers.  If you cross the river at Cliveden Reach (the scene of The Wind in the Willows) and climb up into Burnham Beeches, and walk easterly with a little persistence, Stoke Poges will eventually disclose itself, very small and discreet; and given elevation enough a distant prospect of Eton College can be achieved.  Other beech-trees more distant in time and place are also for me connected with Thomas Gray, almost as tenuously.  I remember that in some summer be­fore the war I found myself in Norfolk in Felbrigg Park.  Here the beech trees are very ancient and of immense girth, their bark as grey and volup­tuous as an elephant’s hide; and antlered stags tiptoed in dainty disdain through the leaf-shadow.  Here a great beech had been felled; and once the main splitting of it had been achieved with auger and black powder, and beetle and wedge, its wood under the bitt of a sharp axe had the texture of bone or boxwood and was speckled with pale mauve flecks like caraway seeds.  Not very long ago I realized that that estate with the haunting Scandinavian name was owned by the man who twenty years later was to write a biography of Gray – a man learned, compassionate, and urbane enough to move easily in Gray’s company.

Another chance pilgrimage took me more recently to the Cosin Feast at Peterhouse, where I discovered from a portrait hanging outside my bedroom in the Master’s Lodge that there was once a Master of Peterhouse named John Whalley.  The name, being familiar but uncommon, stirred my interest.  I had always known about my regicide forebear Edward who married Cromwell’s niece and, being a resolute soldier, be­came Master of Cromwell’s Horse and his Quartermaster General; and how at the Restoration he was less vigorously hunted than most of the regicides and escaped with his son-in-law to New England and is still re­membered in New Haven for his benevolence and a street named for him (though mispronounced).  I had come to know too of another John Whalley, presumably some collateral forebear, who is succinctly de­scribed in DNB as a ‘quack’ on the preposterous grounds that he sold universal nostrums in Dublin, practised necromancy, and issued an astro­logical almanac entitled Advice from the Stars; and how, when Dublin got too hot for him, he settled in London and for the last ten years of his life lived off the proceeds of a libellous weekly called Whalley’s News­letter.  Clearly a man of a different kidney from the Peter Whalley, con­temporary of Gray, who preceded James Boyer as Upper Grammar Master at Christ’s Hospital, edited Ben Jonson’s plays (poorly), married an extravagant wife, and died in Ostend escaping from his creditors.  Yet here, in the Master’s Lodge of Peterhouse, there had lived a Whalley once, who spoke with Gray and sat at the same High Table when Gray was a fellow-commoner, being made Regius Professor of Divinity in the year of Gray’s domestication in Peterhouse.  He looks demure enough in his portrait; but he is remembered for an almost imperturbable indo­lence, notable even at a time when the universities expected that sort of thing.  Gray however found that John Whalley, when roused from his lethargy, could be morose, mulish, and vindictive.  I suspect that he was not very intelligent, or else had allowed his intelligence to lapse; I am not altogether happy about this.  He was the sort of Master that only death could remove; and remove him it did, seven years before Gray’s hasty translation to Pembroke.

Nothing but affection for the memory of Thomas Gray would have led me to open this reminiscent vein.  To rehearse on this occasion the ways and words of this man, who was melancholy but not joyless, re­ticent but not untouched by passion, would be liturgically correct, and an elegiac mode would be appropriate, for the limpid movement of elegy can embrace at times the fact of death and at times the care of vine-plants and the nurture of bees.  But elegy is a learned mode, not brief when cast into prose.  I must limit myself to a theme less incantatory, less poignant, in order to raise certain questions about the constitution of Thomas Gray’s mind and the relation between poetry and life.  I wish to suggest that Gray’s Hellenism places him in a peculiar position in respect of poetic sensibility; and that if there were some way of reconstructing and delineating the whole scope and quality of his mind and poetic intelli­gence – if we could come at the person living, thinking, writing, suffer­ing, the whole man as distinct from that more analytic figure that psy­chology reconstructs to explain the more perplexing of his overt actions (his poems, for example) – then there might also be some way of dissolv­ing the persistent but factitious distinction between ‘classic’ and ‘roman­tic’ as traditionally – and perhaps sometimes a little uncritically – applied in the history and analysis of English letters.

When the title of ‘Humanist’ is applied to Thomas Gray, and we think of him as a fastidious man, timid, hypochondriac, melancholic, with­drawn, and add to this his capacity for affairs when need arose, his compassion, the vulnerability of his so carefully concealed nature, and his capacity for love, the word seems to suit him like a stately but ill-fitting garment, a benevolent alternative to barbarism.  The name Humanist however belongs properly – or should I say, historically – to the man whose mind is coloured by the Latin and Greek spirit as we have it in their literature, history, and philosophy.  Latin and Greek: two very different cultures, two ways of mind almost irreconcilable.  A knowl­edge of Greek has always been unusual among talented writers in Eng­lish, and to possess the sense and spirit of the Greek mind is even rarer.  For this reason I prefer the term ‘Hellenist’ to Humanist; then there can be no mistake that Greek is intended together with whatever else the word implies.

Greek has never been a dominant or shaping force in English letters, even though since its first tenuous introduction to England in the late fif­teenth century a knowledge of Greek was the prized and distinctive mark of the early Humanist.  Milton stands apart from all English writers of comparable stature for the strength of his Greek.  His annotated copies of Pindar, Euripides, Lycophron, and Aratus survive as detailed testimony; certainly his reading of the Poetics was more perceptive, more faithful to Aristotle, than was the reading of his Italian contemporaries that then prevailed and still largely prevails, and his understanding of tragedy is more truly Aristotelian in his conduct of Samson Agonistes than most of the commentators who have (in his absence) argued the point with him.  Yet even in his poetry I hear little that I would identify as Greek in col­our or instinct.  During the eighteenth century the study of Greek had been firmly established in the universities as a necessary concomitant to Latin; even though the universities were moribund, no man could call himself then – or now – a classical scholar if he knew no Greek.  To master that beautiful, direct, supple language is no small achievement; and be­yond that is the way of shaping the mind sensitively to the lyrical power, the intellectual daring, and philosophical clarity that find their body in the monuments of Greek writing.  Needless to say, a minute knowledge of Greek is not, and never was, a panacea; the history of scholarship does not persuade us that Greek provides an impregnable armour against pedantry or intemperance; it failed to make a reliable scholar of Gilbert Wakefield or an urbane man of Samuel Parr.  But the lack of it can also induce thinness in the voice, and in the language unrefined rhythms and coarse textures.  In a notable outburst B. Ivor Evans cries out against the absence of the Greek spirit in English literature.

Chapman, though he translated Homer, wrote like a barbarian, whose great, tough genius involved itself in complexities far re­moved from any possible conception of a Greek ideal.  Ben Jonson, despite his acquaintance with Greek, is Latin in his origins when those origins are not English.  Shelley, who studied Greek closely and used Greek mythology for his most effective expression in Prometheus Unbound, has obviously departed completely from any adherence to Greek motives or values. Tennyson, Browning, Swin­burne, and Landor, though they study Greek, employ that knowl­edge in verse to which classical principles have made only a minor contribution.  Milton stands apart. ... Dryden, who loved the clas­sics as much perhaps as any English writer, was far happier with Latin than with Greek.  He used Latin versions of Homer and Theocritus, and ‘Longinus’ he knew through Boileau and John Hall.  Latin influences are again behind the eighteenth century, with Horace mainly in Pope, and Juvenal in Johnson.[i]

Some acquaintance with Greek was not uncommon among the literate of the eighteenth century and much of the nineteenth century; but Gray evidently had more than a tincture and did not lose it when he left school.  In August 1750 he begins a letter to Wharton with the sly com­ment: ‘Aristotle says (one may write Greek to you without Scandal) ...’ and quotes from the Nicomachean Ethics (Corres., I, 327) – a somewhat different affair from Wordsworth’s luxurious statement in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads: ‘Aristotle, I have been told, has said, that Poetry is the most philosophical of all writing.’[ii]  Mathias’s 1814 edition of the Works first printed some notes Gray had written on Plato and Socrates and all eleven of Aristophones’ plays.  Could Gray then have been an Augustan poet who had read beyond Virgil, Homer, Juvenal and Catullus, the Poetics in Italian, and the Iliad in Mr. Pope’s ingenious translation?  A list drawn from the catalogues of Gray’s library and from his notebooks is impressive.[iii]  In Gray’s library all the major Greek and Latin writers were represented, and many obscure ones too.  In September 1746 when Pem­broke College was thinking of doing something about its library, Gray sent Wharton from the alphabetical list of his own library ‘a Page of Books: enough I imagine to chuse out of, considering the State of your Coll: Finances.  the best Editions of ancient Authors should be the first Things, I reckon, in a Library: but if you think otherwise, I will send a Page of a different Kind’ (Corres., I, 241-42).  He intended, but did not seriously embark upon, editions of Strabo, Plato, and the Greek Anthol­ogy (some poems from which he rendered in Latin elegiacs).  His note­books contain painstaking and continuous notes on his reading of Greek authors – not as copious or sharply focused as the notes in his inter­leaved Linnaeus, but much more than idle or trifling: on Plutarch, Sophocles, Fabricius’s Bibliotheca Graeca, Diogenes Laertius, Athenaeus, Lysias, Isocrates (‘the Panegyrick, the De Pace, Areopagitic, & Advice to Philip, are by far the noblest remains we have of this Writer, & equal to most things extant in the Greek tongue’ [Corres., III, 1121]), Andocides, Antiphon, Xenophon, Thucydides.

To have read carefully all these works, however, tells little about the manner of reading or the quality of sensibility.  Even on grounds of plaus­ibility van Hook’s statement that ‘Thomas Gray was perhaps the most learned man of his age’ seems a little extravagant – certainly as far as Greek scholarship is concerned.  Samuel Parr, it is true, considered Gray one of the few men in England who ‘well understood’ Plato;[iv] and Samuel Parr – a coarse bombastic man, immodest in self-assessment, memorable to Coleridge for the ‘dray-horse tread’ of his prose style though celebrated as a composer of polished Latin epigrams – Samuel Parr was indeed a most learned man, a stupendous scholar.  Gray does not walk with such a man; nor with Richard Bentley (whose eldest son made the illustrations for the Six Poems), nor with Thomas Tyrwhitt who was said to know ‘almost every European tongue’, who edited Chaucer, wrote perceptively on Shakespeare, was principal detector of the Chatterton forgeries, and made the first important edition of Aristotle’s Poetics to be achieved by an Englishman; nor with Thomas Twining, tea-merchant manqué, who made almost the first and still one of the best English translations of Aristotle’s Poetics; nor with Richard Porson, master of Euripides, re­storer of the Greek inscription on the Rosetta Stone, whose beautiful Greek script has been one of the delights of classical study ever since types were cut from it for use in a series of Cambridge editions of Greek plays in 1810.  Gray was not a classical scholar in the sense that any of these eighteenth-century English scholars was.  He composed elegant Latin; he was an independent student of Greek, much more than a dilettante.  He was not required – professionally or otherwise – to study or to teach Greek.  To read the ancient literature, to enjoy it and under­stand it as best he could, was one of the absorbing preoccupations of his life.

Two or three extracts from his letters show with what eager enthusi­asm he read his Greek.  To West in May 1742:

You see, by what I sent you, that I converse, as usual, with none but the dead: They are my old friends, and almost make me long to be with them.  You will not wonder therefore, that I, who live only in times past, am able to tell you no news of the present.  I have fin­ished the Peloponnesian war much to my honour, and a tight con­flict it was, I promise you.  I have drank and sung with Anacreon for the last fortnight, and am now feeding sheep with Theocritus.  Besides, to quit my figure, (because it is foolish) I have run over Pliny’s Epistles and Martial ὲκ παρέργου; not to mention Petrarch, who, by the way, is sometimes very tender and natural. I must needs tell you three lines in Anacreon, where the expression seems to me inimitable. ... Guess, too, where this is about a dimple.  (Corres., I, 202)

West replied suitably: ‘Your fragment is in Aulus Gellius; and both it and your Greek delicious.  But why are you so melancholy?’  Again, in September 1746, Gray writes from Stoke, this time to Wharton:

I take it very ill you should have been in the twentieth Year of the War, & yet say nothing of the Retreat from before Syracuse [in Thucydides]: is it, or is it not the finest Thing you ever read in your Life?  and how does Xenophon, or Plutarch agree with you?  for my Part I read Aristotle; his Poeticks, Politicks, and Morals, tho’ I don’t well know, w^ch is which.  in the first Place he is the hardest Author by far I ever meddled with. then he has a dry Conciseness that makes one imagine one is perusing a Table of Contents rather than a Book: it tasts for all the World like chop’d Hay, or rather like chop’d Logick; for he has a violent Affection to that Art, being in some Sort his own Invention; so that he often loses him­self in little trifleing Distinctions & verbal Niceties, & what is worse leaves you to extricate yourself as you can.  thirdly he has suffer’d vastly by the Transcribblers, as all Authors of great Brevity neces­sarily must.  fourthly and lastly he has abundance of fine uncom­mon Things, w^ch make him well worth the Pains he gives one.  you see what you have to expect.  this & a few autumnal Verses are my Entertainments dureing the Fall of the Leaf.  notwithstanding w^ch my Time lies heavy on my Hands, & I want to be at home again.  (Corres., I, 241)

He must have persisted with Aristotle.  In June 1757, when he sent Mason ‘the breast & merry-thought & guts &: garbage of the chicken, w^ch I have been chewing so long, that I would give the world for neck-beef, or cow-heel’ (Corres., II, 503) – the latest revision, that is, of ‘The Bard’ – he showed that he had read the Poetics more perceptively than most of his contemporaries, and had assimilated it for intelligent rather than pre­scriptive use.

I wish you were here, for I am tired of writing such stuff; & besides I have got the old Scotch ballad, on w^ch Douglas was founded [i.e. Gil Morrice].  it is divine, & as long as from hence to Aston.  have you ever seen it?  Aristotle’s best rules are observed in it in a man­ner, that shews the Author never had heard of Aristotle.  it begins in the fifth Act of     the Play; you may read it two-thirds through without guessing, what it is about; & yet when you come to the end, it is impossible not to understand the whole story.  I send you the first two verses. (Corres., 504-5)

If we take a cursory muster of Gray’s published poems something inter­esting emerges in support of his Hellenism.  In 1756 at the age of forty-one he was offered the poet laureateship and declined it.  The offer was based on the ‘Elegy’ principally; otherwise his reputation can have rested only upon the other five poems in the Six Poems (1753) – the three odes (‘On the Spring’, ‘On Eton College’, and ‘To Adversity’) that mark his first and most prolonged outburst of poetic energy in 1742 (if any­thing so slow-burning can be called an outburst), an ode on the death of Horace Walpole’s favourite cat, and the ‘Long Story’, the facetious record of a flattering but inconsequent flirtation.  To be offered the laureateship for so slender a harvest was a little embarrassing.  ‘I have nothing more, either nocturnal or diurnal, to deck his [Dodsley’s] Mis­cellany with’, he had told Walpole in 1751;[v] and when Dodsley had the book all ready, Gray protested about the title – ‘to have it conceived that I publish a Collection of Poems (half a dozen little Matters, four of w^ch too have already been printed again & again) thus pompously adorned would make me appear very justly ridiculous’ (Corres., I, 371).  Even with Bentley’s illustrations and printed on only one side of the leaves, it made not more than 36 pages.  When Whitehead picked up the laureateship that Gray had contemptuously put aside, there seems to have been no reaction, either of rejoicing or derision: England did not at that moment suffer from an embarrassment of poetic riches.  The ‘Elegy’ had struck a commanding chord, and so had the Latinism of the three other grave odes.  But Gray intended to move forward.  When he started writing English verse in 1742 he stopped writing Latin verse and intensified his reading of Greek.

His next published volume came in 1757, the first-fruits of the Officina Arbuteana: the first two Pindaric Odes – ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard’ – printed without titles and with virtually no notes, and addressed (with two words from Pindar’s IInd Olympian Ode) ‘to the intelligent alone’.  When the ‘Progress of Poesy’ was seventeen lines short of completion and five years short of publication Gray had told Walpole that he might soon send Dodsley ‘an ode to his own tooth, a high Pindarick upon stilts, which one must be a better scholar than he is to understand a line of, and the very best scholars will understand but a little matter here and there’ (Corres., I, 364).  When it came to publica­tion he declined to help his readers: ‘I do not love notes, though you see I had resolved to put two or three.  They are signs of weakness and ob­scurity.  If a thing cannot be understood without them, it had better be not understood at all.’[vi]  Embarrassed at the praise of the ‘Elegy’ which had slipped into print by accident and might never have been acknowl­edged by its author but for the outrageous inaccuracies of the unauthorized printing, Gray was seriously attempting something more difficult, more exalted, more intricate and dangerous than he had before ventured in public.  The composition had engaged him for almost five years; he placed greater store by those two Odes than even the ‘Elegy’.  ‘They are Greek, they are Pindaric, they are sublime!’ Walpole told Mann; ‘consequently I fear a little obscure.’[vii]  Gray (as author) asked Walpole (as printer) to tell him ‘what you hear any body say, (I mean, if any body says any thing)’ (Corres., II, 513).  A few intelligent readers admired them for their eloquence and some admired the ‘Progress of Poesy’ for the ren­dering of Pindaric metres into English with a strictness never before attempted.  But most readers found them insuperably obscure; and since that age was reasonably honest – unlike our own, in which the unintelligibility of a slipshod piece of thinking can be taken as grounds for acclaim – the poems failed.  ‘nobody understands me’, Gray said; ‘& I am perfectly satisfied’ (Corres., II, 522).  But he was not satisfied: he was bitterly disappointed.  ‘the Συνετοί [intelligent] appear to be still fewer, than even I expected’ (Corres., II, 518).  He knew some readers would have difficulty with the subject matter; but they were objecting to the very reason for the Odes existing – their rhapsodic and incantatory style; and to this cry Dr. Samuel Johnson, never beloved of Gray, had added his portentous voice.[viii]  Gray stopped writing poetry for publication for many years and withdrew into his cherished privacy.

In the spring of 1767, almost ten years after the two Pindarics had been published, Gray yielded to Dodsley’s desire to print ‘all I have ever publish’d’, and in December of that year he also agreed to James Beattie’s request that the Foulis brothers of Glasgow be allowed to issue their own edition of the same collection.  So the collected poems appeared ­– eight in number – almost simultaneously in two editions: an unlovely edition by Dodsley in London on 12 March 1768, and a handsome Scottish quarto printed by Foulis in types specially designed.  ‘The Long Story was to be totally omitted, as its only use (that of explaining the prints [by Bentley]) was gone: but to supply the place of it in bulk, lest my works should be mistaken for the works of a flea, or a pismire, I promised to send him an equal weight of poetry or prose: so, ... I put up about two ounces of stuff; viz.  The Fatal Sisters, The Descent of Odin ... , a bit of something from the Welch [i.e. The Triumphs of Owen], and certain little notes, partly from justice (to acknowledge the debt, where I had borrowed any thing), partly from ill temper, just to tell the gentle reader, that Edward I. was not Oliver Cromwell, nor queen Elizabeth the witch of Endor.  This is literally all; and with all this I shall be but a shrimp of an author.’[ix]  Despite the additional notes – there had only been four in the 1757 – he was not disposed to ingratiate his readers, extending the Pindaric epigraph to read: ‘[shafts] that speak clearly to the intelli­gent; but for the generality they need interpreters.’  The three new poems were impenitently in the voice of ‘The Bard’, drawn from Icelandic and Welsh originals by way of Latin with greater rhapsodic assurance than the first two Pindaric Odes had shown.  Walpole had urged Gray to write more, but Gray replied firmly: ‘To what you say to me so civilly, that I ought to write more, I reply in your own words (like the pamphleteer, who is going to confute you out of your own mouth), What has one to do, when turned of fifty, but really to think of finishing?  However, I will be candid (for you seem to be so with me), and avow to you, that till fourscore-and-ten, whenever the humour takes me, I will write, because I like it; and because I like myself better when I do so.  If I do not write much, it is because I cannot.’[x]  But he never broke silence in public again ­– except for the ‘Installation Ode’ (1769), an unhappy episode to do with human pride and the vanity of human wishes.[xi]

The copious notes added in 1768 help us to pick up what Gray thought were his tracks.  In the Six Poems he acknowledges debts to Shakespeare, Milton, Green, and Dryden (including Dryden’s translation of Ovid) – for Gray was after all an English poet – and to Dante and Petrarch, be­cause he read Italian as well as French; but among the classical authors he recognizes only Virgil, unless there is a distant echo of Sophocles in the ‘Eton’ ode.  The acknowledged debts in ‘The Bard’ are to Shake­speare, Dryden, Milton, and Spenser; and in ‘The Fatal Sisters’ to Milton and Shakespeare.  ‘The Progress of Poesy’ draws heavily on English and Latin and for the first time on Greek: Shakespeare and Milton are joined by Cowley, Ossian, and the Authorised Version of the Bible; from the Latin, Virgil, Lucretius, and Juvenal; from the Greek, beyond the over­arching presence of Pindar, there is Homer and Phrynichus.[xii]  In his first period of fluent composition in 1742 Gray had turned to Greek – Pindar and Lysias particularly – with a zest that was never to be quenched.  Whatever was specifically Greek in ‘The Progress of Poesy’ had been carried over, by transformation of rhythm, tone, and energy, into three later bardic poems.  His knowledge of Icelandic and Welsh was scanty; but the Latin versions he had to use to make sense of the originals did not deflect him from the Pindaric urgency and intricacy that he sensed in the Icelandic and Welsh.  A conclusion might be ventured: that the three odes of 1742 and the ‘Elegy’ are dominantly Latin; that ‘The Progress of Poesy’ and ‘The Bard’ are consciously Pindaric, although only ‘The Progress’ seeks to reproduce Pindar’s metrics in detail; and that the three later bardic odes, despite their Nordic and Celtic origins, are Greek in inspiration, shaped to the lyrical texture and impetuosity of Pindar’s odes – a tune now fully assimilated and perhaps no longer consciously sought.

Matthew Arnold seems to be quite clear about Thomas Gray.  Gray, he tells us, fell upon an age of prose; ‘a sort of spiritual east wind was blowing’; his genius could not flower; he would have been ‘another man’ if he had been born in the same year as Milton, or in the same year as Burns.[xiii]  Perhaps Arnold was not seriously applying to Gray the ‘mute inglorious Milton’ proposition so dearly (if only intermittently) beloved by Ontario Ministers of Education.  Perhaps Arnold was saying in his roundabout importunate way that Gray was a greater poet than his poems would lead us to suspect.  In fact Shakespeare was born when he was born; Milton was born when he was born; Gray was born when he was born.  It is a critic’s business to take what happens to be given and to look at it carefully, and if possible with a sense of wonder.  We are given Gray’s poems, his letters, some annotated books, some notebooks.  What happens if we try to sketch out his poetic capacity on evidence other than simply the poems themselves?  For in speaking of Gray’s Hellenism – which is not perhaps very prominent in his poems – we wish to get at his sense of language and his sense of the textures of feeling and thinking.

Gray not only had an excellent ear for verse; he was also a musician of some accomplishment and much learning, as his letters bear almost Pepysian witness.[xiv]  Also he had, if any man ever had, a poet’s eye, the ‘armed vision’:[xv] when he looks at a beetle it is like Aristotle looking at a dogfish.  Only in some neutral and abstract sense are eye and ear merely recording faculties; the ear is one sense, the eye is another; and both are profoundly affected, each in its own way, in their acuity and discrimina­tion, by the mind behind the ear, the feeling behind the eye, and by the generative reaction of the whole person in any moment of perception.  Gray’s interest in natural history – and here Ketton-Cremer puts it so well that I must read from his pages –

Gray’s interest in natural history had been a constant resource to him, ever since he first watched the flowers and insects in the Buck­inghamshire meadows.  He loved to grow plants in water or damp moss in his rooms, and sometimes extended his researches to the animal world, as when he reared the larvae of insects in a cup of water, and kept an owl, ‘as like me as it can stare’, in the college garden.  His microscope was as often in use as his harpsichord; and during his summer tours he delighted to collect all kinds of herbs and roots, butterflies and beetles and the creatures of the rock-pools by the sea.  His observations and experiments were recorded in Latin in his pocket notebooks, and most   of them were later trans­ferred to the interleaved Linnaeus – details of the hermit crab whose behaviour he watched on the beach at Hartlepool, and the young pelican which he saw at Glamis, and the eggs of the scaven­ger beetle which he discovered in the dead body of a mole at Cam­bridge.  (Gray, p.  213)

To be more particular: to read Gray’s letters at random is like reading his contemporary Gilbert White, although Gray never knew White and the Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne was not published until 1795, two years after White’s death and almost twenty-five after Gray’s.  Birds, plants, insects, the temperature of the ambient air, the look of the sky, the feel of the weather; the dates and seasons of crops, flowers, fruit – these are the ground bass to the passacaglia of his quotidian awareness, an intricate and grave liturgy of wonder, the requisite and clarifying engage­ment of the senses in his knowing of the world and his knowing of him­self.  To Wharton on 31 January 1761:

the 18^th of Jan: I took a walk to Kentish-Town, wind N:W:, bright & frosty.  Therm: at Noon was at 42.  the grass remarkably green & flourishing.  I observed on dry banks facing the South that Chick-weed, Dandelion, Groundsel, Red Archangel, & Shepherds-Purse were beginning to flower.  (Corres., II, 729)

Again to Thomas Wharton, on 18 April 1770:

our weather till Christmas continued mild & open.  28 Dec: some snow fell but did not lie.  the 4^th of Jan: was stormy & snowy, w^ch was often repeated during the month, yet the latter half of it warm & gentle. 18 Feb: was snow again, the rest of it mostly fine. snow again on 15^th March, from 23 to 30 March was cold & dry, W^d E: or N:E:.  on y^e 31^st rain.  from thence till within a week past, W^d N:W: or N:E: with much hail & sleet; & on 4 Apr: a thunder­storm.  it is now fine spring-weather.

1 March.  first violet appear’d.  frogs abroad.

4 – – –     Almond blow’d, & Gooseberry spread its leaves.

9 – – –     Apricot blow’d.

1 April.    Violets in full bloom, & double Daffodils.

5 – – –     Wren singing, double Jonquils.[xvi]

These preoccupations in the later years vexed Walpole – the copious naturalist’s notes, the detailed drawings in a most delicate hand: here, thought Walpole, was the greatest poet of his age ‘heaping notes on an interleaved [copy of] Linnaeus, instead of pranking on his lyre’.[xvii]  Gray was not easily roused: ‘to be employed’, he might have said, ‘is to be happy’.  One of the last things he wrote (again in his copy of Linnaeus’s Systema Naturae) was a set of eight beautifully turned Latin verses on the Orders of Insects and death seems to have interrupted him at the first line of a ninth.  Even with a friend as intimate as Walpole, Gray must be allowed a degree of ironic reticence; for Walpole to search farther would be to probe at the roots of the man’s poetic nature.  Perception of this order is not only rarely achieved and more rarely sustained; whether as highly developed as Gray’s, it is the physical and vital root of poetry itself.  In such perception the senses merge and resonate: the eye loses its abstractive cunning, the ear engages rhythms, the pulsed and pulsing sounds that are the mark and movement of life; and in this state all things become tactile – even sounds, colours, light, words.  In Gray’s De principiis cogitandi (I, 62-78) there is a remarkable passage on the sense of touch.[xviii]

[When] sensations ... pour themselves into the fresh mind, and ... crowd around the entrances in a fivefold procession, the sense of touch plays the leading role; it goes first, widening the dark path for the lesser crowd, and restrains its headlong rush.  This sense is not subject to the same restrictions that its brothers are: since it is the first-born, it asserts a wider sway, and has its dwelling deep in the marrow of the bones and throughout the viscera, and is widely diffused and has its being in the warp and woof of the skin. Indeed, even the child that has not yet struggled forth from its mother’s womb dissolves the many layers of covering and bursts the chains; although it is as yet wrapped in soft slumber and bathed in warm fluid, nevertheless a very slight breeze has already been stimulating the sense of touch and opening the way for the breath of life.  This activity is intensified the moment the child has exchanged the soothing warmth to which it has grown accustomed for the chill of the outer air, which assails its untried limbs with savage fury.  Then a more excruciating sense of touch begins to function, and Pain, the constant companion of human life, takes possession. 

Mason first published this in 1775.  Whether Coleridge ever read it with attention I do not know (though he annotated a copy of the 1814 Works); the connection with Locke would certainly temper his interest.  But much of what Gray says here is also said by Coleridge in a fragmentary way in many places and at dates much earlier than 1814; and he has much else to say about the sense of touch, being a more perceptive and original psychologist than Thomas Gray was.  What is most striking in the un­expected coincidence between Gray and Coleridge is the possibility that touch is the first and radical of the senses, that touch is somehow the key to the synaesthesic mode in which feelings are embodied and in which even the play of intellect can be transfigured.  Tact is a central word for Coleridge when he is thinking about poetry and about critical judgement; he used the word fastidiously and so preserved its delicate cutting-edge; the poet’s tact is ‘the Touch of a Blind Man feeling the face of a darling Child’.[xix]  Which is not to say anything about the relation between Gray and Coleridge.  But Coleridge knew a great deal about the nature and origins of poetry – not only his own ‘kind’ of poetry, but of poetry simply – more perhaps in philosophical, psychological, and ex­periential detail than any Englishman before him; and Coleridge knew well that a sound theory of poetry must stand upon a sound theory of perception.  It is startling to find that Thomas Gray had found out some of these things about the senses in his own way and for himself.  He might conceivably have learned these things from his reading; he is more likely to have known them affirmatively from inside himself, from his own ‘inner goings-on’.  That same Antrobus uncle who had used his influence to carry Thomas Gray from the household of a ferocious father and an industrious (but not unaffectionate) shopkeeping mother into Eton College and then to Peterhouse, and had so brought him to the friend­ships that were to keep him rejoicing and grieving for the rest of his life, had also taught him to be a naturalist, encouraging in him a fasci­nation with growing things and small creatures.  Like his acquaintance Christopher Smart until imprisonment in a madhouse drove him to A Song of David and Jubilate Agno, Gray was probably most at his ease in humorous and topical verse.  We know he was endowed with the fas­tidious sense of accuracy of a true scholar – and with a good deal of the scholar’s delicate malice.  Beyond that, his patient, brooding, finely dis­criminate power of observation suggests the potential of a fine poetic sensibility; yet that sensibility is seldom if ever clearly or at first hand realized in his poetry.

Poetry however is made of language, not of natural history; it is made by fitting language to the mind as much as fitting the mind to the world.  If we turn again to Coleridge, himself a Hellenist, there may be other evidence for finding in Gray a Greek way of mind.  Coleridge, born the year after Gray’s death, inherited Gray’s poetry at school and university, and much of his early verse resounds to it.  As a nineteen-year-old under­graduate he sent his elder brother a transcript of two ‘little odes of G[ray]’ – unidentified – which he says were ‘never published’ and which he may have seen in manuscript at Pembroke College.[xx]  Six weeks later he entertained his girl-friend with an account of a visit from ‘the ghost of Gray’ who gave him stern advice: to send her a copy of his works and to ‘write no more verses’ because ‘your poetry is vile stuff; and ... all Poets go to [he]ll’.[xxi]  In 1794 in his first published review he quoted half facetiously from ‘The Progress of Poesy’, and in the same year sent Southey strictures on a poem of his as too reminiscent of ‘The Descent of Odin’ and noticed that another inflated poem was on a theme which is ‘so much better expressed by Gray’.[xxii]  A list of projected writings drawn up by Coleridge in 1796 includes ‘Edition of Collins & Gray with a preliminary Dissertation’ – a title repeated in a slightly later list but never completed.[xxiii]  Though he quotes from the ‘Ode to Vicissitude’ in the same year, and is self-mockingly pleased that some people thought his ‘Ode on the Departing Year’ ‘superior to the Bard’, Gray’s name disap­pears from both the letters and notebooks in 1797 until in 1804 he spotted a parallel to ‘The Progress of Poesy’ in Matthew Smallwood’s ‘Poem on the Death of Cartwright’.[xxiv]  Hazlitt may well have remembered correctly that in 1798 Coleridge ‘spoke with contempt of Gray, and with intoler­ance of Pope’.[xxv]  If Coleridge had ever written the edition of Collins and Gray, he would have argued for Collins’s pre-eminence; for he says in Biographia Literaria that during his first Cambridge vacation he wrote an essay in which he ‘assigned sundry reasons, chiefly drawn from a com­parison of passages in the Latin poets with the original Greek, from which they were borrowed, for the preference of Collins’s odes to those of Gray’.  This comparison, and later conversation with Wordsworth, led him (he said) to see that ‘this style of poetry which I have characterised [he had quoted from ‘The Bard’], ... as translations of prose thoughts into poetic language, had been kept up by, if it did not wholly arise from, the custom of writing Latin verses, and the great importance attached to these exercises, in our public schools’.[xxvi]  What looks like outright dismissal, however, is illuminated a little by a notebook entry of early 1799. 

The elder Languages fitter for Poetry because they expressed only prominent ideas with clearness, others but darkly – Therefore the French wholly unfit for poetry; because [Poetry] is clear in their Language – i.e. – Feelings created by obscure ideas associate them­selves with the one clear idea.  When no criticism is pretended to, & the Mind in its simplicity gives itself up to a Poem as to a work of nature, Poetry gives most pleasure when only generally & not perfectly understood.  It was so by me with Gray’s Bard, & Collins’ odes – The Bard once intoxicated me, & now I read it without pleasure.  From this cause it is that what I call metaphysical Poetry gives me so much delight.[xxvii]

For Coleridge (unlike Gray’s contemporaries) Gray was not too obscure: he was too unobscure.  By securing what to Coleridge’s ear was uniform semantic clarity, Gray had taken the timbre out of the song, the muscle out of the dance; the mysterious self-declarative directness of pure action of mind had been replaced by contorted meaning.  Gray may have trans­lated prose thoughts into verse, but the Greeks didn’t; and when Cole­ridge first read John Donne’s poems his heart leaped up instantly.  What he recognized there was not simply a kind of poetry that he liked – for he had catholic tastes; he recognized the action of poetry declaring itself, the power declared by the intricacy of the containing resistance offered by language and structure.  When Coleridge discussed Gray again in the Biographia his view was perhaps a little more kindly.  ‘I had long before [in discussions with Wordsworth] detected the defects in “the Bard”; but “the Elegy” I had considered as proof against all fair attacks; and to this day I cannot read either without delight, and a portion of enthusiasm.  At all events, whatever pleasure I may have lost by the clearer perception of the faults in certain passages, has been more than repaid to me by the additional delight with which I read the remainder.’[xxviii]  But by 1833, with Lyrical Ballads and the ‘Ancient Mariner’ thirty-five years behind him, he could only say, a little perversely perhaps: ‘I think there is something very majestic in Gray’s Installation Ode; but as to The Bard and the rest of his lyrics, I must say I think them frigid and artificial.  There is more real lyric feeling in Cotton’s Ode on Winter.’[xxix]  This was not a new position; as early as April 1811 he is reported to have said that he thought ‘Collins had more genius than Gray, who was a singular instance of a man of taste, poetic feeling, and fancy, without imagination.’[xxx]

Gray wrote in his ‘Stanzas to Mr.  Bentley’:

                                    ... not to one in this benighted age

                                    Is that diviner inspiration given,

                                    That burns in Shakespeare’s or in Milton’s page,

                                    The pomp and prodigality of heaven.

                                                                                                (11.17-20)

Coleridge singled out the word ‘prodigality’ in these lines as an instance of the untranslatableness of English: ‘English may be called the harvest of the unconscious wisdom of various nations, and was not the formation of any particular time, or assemblage of individuals.’[xxxi]  Yet in 1811, when he had allowed no high merit either to Johnson or Gray and had com­plained that Gray’s personifications ‘were mere printer’s devils’ personi­fications’, he had also said that ‘the excellence of verse was to be untranslatable into any other words without detriment to the beauty of the passage; the position of a single word could not be altered in Milton without injury.’  Was Gray’s failure to match his poetic sensibility to his practice as a poet a failure in the sense of language?  In a letter to West in April 1742, during his first poetic flowering, Gray had put his posi­tion clearly on the matter of poetic diction.

As to matter of stile, I have this to say: The language of the age is never the language of poetry; except among the French, whose verse, where the thought or image does not support it, differs in nothing from prose.  Our poetry, on the contrary, has a language peculiar to itself; to which almost every one, that has written, has added something by enriching it with foreign idioms and deriva­tives: Nay sometimes words of their own composition or invention.  Shakespear and Milton have been great creators this way; and no one more licentious than Pope or Dryden, who perpetually borrow expressions from the former.

He then cites a number of examples from Dryden ‘whom every body reckons a great master of our poetical tongue’.

And our language not being a settled thing (like the French) has an undoubted right to words of an hundred years old, provided antiquity have not rendered them unintelligible. In truth, Shakespear’s language is one of his principal beauties; and he has no less advantage over your Addisons and Rowes in this, than in those other great excellencies you mention.  Every word in him is a pic­ture.  Pray put me the following lines into the tongue of our modern Dramatics: [from Richard III I i].  To me they appear untranslatable; and if this be the case, our language is greatly degenerated.  (Corres., I,192-93)

Coleridge had been trained, he said, by James Boyer at Christ’s Hospital long before he ever talked diction with Wordsworth, ‘to leave out as many epithets as would turn the whole into eight-syllable lines [rather than ten- or eleven-syllable lines], and then ask myself if the exercise would not be greatly improved.  How often have I thought of the pro­posal since then, and how many thousand bloated and puffing lines have I read, that, by this process, would have tripped over the tongue excel­lently.’[xxxii]  This stern discipline was not easily mastered.  His distaste for abstractions and personifications came in the wake of Wordsworth; cer­tainly there is no lack of personifications or abstractions or epithets or compound epithets in his own poems before 1796, and when he came to belabour Southey in 1814 for using typographical personifications in the juvenile ‘Joan of Arc’ he was being the executioner of his own early poetry too.  By then he had had to make his own discoveries about the life of language – as every single poet has to.  For him that central question was: what happens to language in the state of imagination? There is a hint of an answer in a notebook entry of 1829:

Even the Dreams of the Old Testament are for the greater part evidently poetic, the beseeming Drapery of Wisdom either for prudence or for livelier impressions.  Only we need not suppose, that the Hebrew Nabim set to work out a cold-blooded carpentry of  <Dreams> Furors, like <Grays> The Bard or [Southey’s] the Vision of Judgement – In those times and in that country Men reasoned with the organ of Imagination, and vivid Images were sup­plied the place of words, and came more readily than words in a language so limited & scanty as the Hebrew.[xxxiii]

So slight is Gray’s poetic canon that when the ballistas, tortoises, and scaling-ladders of modern critical technique are mounted to assault this little handful of verses, the labour seems ill-expended, the booty not profitable: we come to much the same conclusion that Coleridge came to, though no doubt with more detailed supporting evidence than I have quoted.  The ‘Elegy’ stands up well; the Pindarics are impressive for the meticulous attempt to match the details of Greek prosody, but on the whole they don’t feel much like Pindar; the barbarous later pieces are vigorous but a little strait-laced.  Yet what first had struck me forcibly in Gray’s poetry was the strong contrast between the marmoreal sententiousness of the ‘Elegy’ and the rhapsodic if decorous abandon of the Pindaric and bardic odes; and the fact that both were the necessary utter­ance of the one man.  Although Gray’s Pindarics are not themselves much more rhapsodic than any other deliberately contrived Pindaric ode, Gray himself evidently needed to be rhapsodic in these poems, and went on being even more securely rhapsodic after his readers had said they didn’t like what he was doing.  Here at least the horse was going before the cart; the poetic genesis was necessary and correct no matter what, sub specie aeternitatis, the outcome.  Given Gray’s ear, his knowl­edge, his command of poetic resources – given also his passion and some strong if indefinable need to write – I could see no prima facie reason why he should not have made poems that declare to us beyond doubt from what depths of need or vision they had sprung.  If we notice the vitality covert in his work, it is no more satisfactory to say that the vigour of the odes comes from Gray’s use of exotic materials than is any other reference to a standard checklist of allegedly ‘romantic’ characteristics: the vigour must be in Gray himself and must call to itself the body it needs – exotic, it may be – to shape language to its force and purpose.  Exoticism is often no more than a decorative or mannered confection, as we know from certain Persian eclogues fashionable in the eighteenth century and from Southey’s Mexican and Welsh epics; it is sometimes as enchanting as Brighton Pavilion.  But when exotic detail functions deftly, not only in a geographical and historical sense but also psycho­logically and linguistically, it can become an indispensable resource of distancing if the poet is to trace the movements of mind in psychic space.  This, for example, might account for the pastoral convention in elegy.  For conventional modes, metrical intricacy, and the structure of language itself are all shaping limitations in the making of poetry; a poet must explore them and use them almost as though they were not present if he is to discover in his poem the self-shaping and self-declarative dynamic of language.

The dispute about poetic diction in which Johnson and Wordsworth play so bludgeonly a role is, I think, too often uncritically cast as a simple question of the history and variability of literary taste.  Poetry surely is one, not many – no matter how numerous its manifestations.  Perhaps the only tenable objection to any particular diction is that it doesn’t do effectively what the poet wants it to do.  In general, poetic power calls into use – or fashions for itself – the resources of language it needs.  What is puzzling about Gray’s poetry is that, from what we can infer about his poetic sensibility and technical resources, he seems never quite to have fashioned for himself the words and rhythms he needed to declare the force and subtlety of his inner life or of his poetic intelli­gence.  Which is not to say that he wrote no good poems, but that most of them have not realized the forces that called them into existence.  The ‘Elegy’ is the most successful.  Here he was writing an elegy, not a threnody – a grave and muted reflection upon mortality rather than an uncontrollable outcry against the indignity of death or the desolation of grief.  The ‘Elegy’ falls comfortably within the Latinistic mentality, convention, and syntax; the deliberately contrived diction admirably suits the formality of the thought; he has discovered a beautiful solution to the movement of the Greek or Latin elegiac verse by not attempting to reproduce the classical metric.  But the demands made by the Pindaric poems are emotionally much greater.  The intricate limitations of struc­ture and a certain intractability of diction are present to contain and pattern great force.  Yet ‘The Progress of Poesy’, the only deliberately Pindaric of the poems, is perhaps the least Pindaric in feel.  The bardic odes, departing from the mechanics of Greek prosody, discover their force in a wholly conceived rhythmic movement, as had been the case in the ‘Elegy’; they feel more Greek, more Pindaric, though their origins are not Greek but Icelandic and Welsh through Latin.  Yet even here Gray has not discovered the resonant tone and muscular rhythm that his known excitement over certain ballads and bardic poems aroused in him.  The failure – and it is at most a subtle failure – is not, I think, primarily a failure either of energy or in appropriate structure, but a failure in the sheer dynamics of language itself.  The racy flexibility, the sinewy variety of tone, pace, and emphasis that informs the prose of his letters has for some reason not overflowed into the movement of his verse, in the same way that the tactile delicacy and precision of his naturalist’s vision never overflowed into the texture and imagery of his reflective odes.  The Greek sensibility is present and active, but it has not found itself fully in his language.  It is true also that nobody encouraged him to persist in so delicate and submissive a task.  The poems he prized most highly were coolly received by the public.  That he continued to labour at the bardic poems is a mark of his courage in facing a Latin world in a Greek spirit.

If I had to say what in English poetry feels truly Pindaric in the Greek sense, I can think only of ‘Kubla Khan’ and perhaps ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ – poems written by highly skilled metrists, both good Greek scholars, both with an exceptional sense of the intrinsic vitality of lan­guage, of language as something with a life of its own.  To say that both are in some sense ‘romantic’ is, I think, to sound a cuckoo-cry rather than a trumpet-call.  The question is not one of ‘romantic’ and ‘classic’ but of Greek and Latin.  ‘Romanticism is disease; classicism is health’, Goethe said; ‘the point is for the work to be thoroughly good, then it is sure to be classical.’  By ‘classical’ Goethe could not have meant the cramped Latinistic neoclassicism in the England of the late seventeenth and the eighteenth century that achieved momentous force in Dryden and the clarity equally of delight and venom in Pope, and otherwise ran much to the unfocused and unsymbolized expression of feeling that (since Eliot) is properly called sentimentality.  It was sentimentality that Goethe deplored, being as a young man capable of it himself.  When Words­worth’s critics after some fifteen years got tired of abusing him, some in praising him called him a ‘classical’ poet – which in those days, as for Goethe, was a word of high if uncritical honour.  Yet Wordsworth, com­pared with Coleridge, is radically a Latin, not a Greek mind, very much of an eighteenth-century temper as his later poetry shows.  If Words­worth is Greek at all it is in a certain Aristotelian specificity that can de­flect abstractions into substance; but when he reflects, as reflect he almost inevitably does, the movement of the verse is not rhapsodic but elegiac.

To move from one language to another is not only to change the shape of the mouth and the features but also to move from one pattern of thought and feeling to another, to think differently in a different syntax, to feel differently.  Greek and Latin, as modes of thought and sensibility, are almost irreconcilable; English is closer, as a language and a way of mind, to Greek than to Latin; and English has suffered terrible violence from the rigours and inflexibilities of the Roman mind.  Once Latin had become the lingua franca of the learned world the force and delicacy of the Greek mind and language became systematically distorted and coars­ened, in the same way that Roman copies of Greek sculpture become purposeful, muscle-bound, and haunted – changing Aristotle’s Poetics (for example) almost beyond recognition, and earlier, in the middle ages, stripping the presocratic philosophers and the neoplatonists – and even Aristotle – of a certain oriental subtlety and ambivalence.  This was achieved progressively not only by those who, knowing no Greek, had to read in Latin, but also by those who read their Greek in a Latin mode – as I suspect Milton largely did, and Pope and Johnson certainly did.  There have been very few English poets whose work is commanded by the classical spirit – that is, by the spirit of both Greek and Latin.  There is no truly classical period of English poetry.  Those writers and periods that are commonly regarded as ‘classical’ are notably Latinistic and in certain important respects spiritually limited.  Hence the otiose artifici­ality – in English usage anyway – of the romantic-classic distinction; it turns almost entirely upon superficies and artificials.  The brothers Schlegel, who started that hare, were learned in Greek, imbued with its spirit, and could not conceive of the term ‘classical’ other than as includ­ing, if not dominated by, Greek.  Hence the subtlety of their distinction, and the speed with which – even among their learned poet-friends and disciples in Germany – the distinction eroded into the banality of self-conscious cults and the make-work of professional polemics.

After all, it was Wordsworth who learned from Gray, not Gray who heralded Wordsworth.  Wordsworth knew Gray’s work early, and on the whole admired it much more than Coleridge did; and he acknowledged with gratitude that his very characteristic ‘Ode to Duty’ was drawn from Gray’s ‘Ode to Adversity’.  In 1794 when Wordsworth was walking through the Lakes with his brother John he was reading Gray’s journal of the Lakes.  And when Coleridge and Wordsworth came to the head of Bassenthwaite on 10 November 1799 they chose to sleep at an inn at Ouse Bridge (now vanished) possibly because they knew Gray had once dined there.  Many years after he had left Dove Cottage, Wordsworth remembered Gray’s beautiful description of the Vale of Grasmere; he may even have chosen Dove Cottage in the autumn of 1799 because he looked at Grasmere for an instant through Thomas Gray’s eyes.[xxxiv]  It would be interesting to be able to define exactly how far and in what way Wordsworth’s poetic sensibility was directly affected by Gray’s feeling for the countryside and its creatures; for Gray’s way of looking is more Coleridge’s way than Wordsworth’s.[xxxv]

Thomas Gray was a very secret man, except to his intimate friends.  For many years he had an ambition to be Cambridge Professor of Modern History, a subject in which he was almost as learned as in natural his­tory.  When his hope was eventually realized he gave no lectures and is not known to have supervised the studies of any undergraduate.  His in­augural lecture, elaborately planned and partly composed in Latin, was never delivered.  He intended to prepare some lectures and even to read them; he would resign his chair (he said) if he could not show some sign of fulfilling what was expected of him.  Perhaps nothing was expected; he neither lectured nor resigned.  This – and much else – is cause for wonder.  If in the end Gray’s Hellenism was not impetuous enough to allow him fully to realize the poetic force of his remarkable perceptual and intellectual endowments, it may also be that Greek language and literature can no longer ­– in the general ignorance of our times – ferti­lize our poetry, except in very rare individuals.  Our sense of the beautiful vitality of Greek may almost totally have vanished.  If that is so, we should expect to seek nourishment in our own language, now greatly developed since Thomas Gray used it, and in our literature so immensely rich and varied that it may now encompass even the suppleness and concentra­tion of Greek (though seldom its superb clarity of tone and movement).  Our poets have a momentous task now in discovering and rediscovering the integrity of language, greatly menaced as it is by widespread habits of indiscipline – habits that would appal Gray both as scholar and poet.  As critics, however, we must also look back, as Gray looked back, towards the sources, both historical and personal.  In considering the tantalizing anomaly of Gray’s poetic destiny, we might find there some critical dis­criminations that would release us from the tyranny of habitual cate­gories and self-justifying procedures.  As we study the ‘monuments of our own magnificence’ we should also do well to turn back to the Greek way of mind and language, by whatever means we can; for in many hidden ways it has given nerve, precision, and grace to our own language.  Cer­tainly it was in the secret places of Gray’s genius.  We should be ill-advised to neglect the traces of it there.