Abstract
In 1823, while an undergraduate at Bowdoin College in Brunswick (Maine), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow wrote to his mother, Zilpah, about his recent immersion in the odes of Thomas Gray. As Nicholas Basbanes tells it: ‘I am very much pleased with them,’ he had determined, citing several as being ‘admirable,’ though he found ‘many passages’ to be ‘quite obscure to me’ in that they ‘seem to partake in a great degree of the sublime. Obscurity is the greatest objection which many urge against Gray. They do not consider that it contributes to the highest degree of sublimity; and he certainly aimed at sublimity in these Odes.’ Two days later, Zilpah replied. ‘I am not very conversant with the poetry of Gray, dear H.’, she wrote, ‘and therefore cannot tell whether I should be as pleased with it in general as you are’. Still, referring to Gray’s most celebrated poem, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’, she ventured:
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