Thomas Gray 1716–1771
Thomas Gray is generally considered the second most important poet of the eighteenth century (following the dominant figure ofAlexander Pope) and the most disappointing. It was generally assumed by friends and readers that he was the most talented poet of his generation, but the relatively small and even reluctantly published body of his works has left generations of scholars puzzling over the reasons for his limited production and meditating on the general reclusiveness and timidity that characterized his life. Samuel Johnson was the first of many critics to put forward the view that Gray spoke in two languages, one public and the other private, and that the private language—that of his best-known and most-loved poem, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (published in 1751 as An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard)—was too seldom heard. William Wordsworth decided in his preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798), using Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" (1775) as his example, that Gray, governed by a false idea of poetic diction, spoke in the wrong language; and Matthew Arnold, in an equally well-known judgment, remarked that the age was wrong for a poetry of high seriousness, that Gray was blighted by his age and never spoke out at all. Such judgments sum up the major critical history of Gray's reception and reputation as a poet. He has always attracted attentive critics precisely because of the extraordinary continuing importance of the "Elegy," which, measured against his other performances, has seemed indisputably superior.
Born in Cornhill on 26 December 1716, Gray was the fifth of twelve children of Philip and Dorothy Antrobus Gray and the only one to survive infancy. His father, a scrivener given to fits of insanity, abused his wife. She left him at one point; but Philip Gray threatened to pursue her and wreak vengeance on her, and she returned to him. From 1725 to 1734 Thomas Gray attended Eton, where he met Richard West...