Gray, Thomas | Wallace Jackson (essay date 1987)
Wallace Jackson (essay date 1987)
SOURCE: "Thomas Gray and the Dedicatory Muse," in ELH, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 277-98.
[In the following essay, Jackson provides a detailed examination of Gray's treatment of the themes of desire and authority in his poetry.]
I will be occupied here with one abiding question: what kingdom of the imagination does Thomas Gray wish to build? I do not think I can quite explain why he is the most disappointing poet of the English eighteenth century—disappointing, that is, in terms of what was expected of him—but I do hope to explore the nature of a failed enterprise that of its kind is unrivaled within the century. I attribute this failure to no cultural malaise, for it seems to me utterly and completely personal, nor do I propose that had Gray been born in the year he died (1771) he would have become another sort of poet, flourishing in and helping to create the poetic climate inhabited by Blake...
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