Fearful Joy, Papers from the Thomas Gray Bicentenary Conference at Carleton University, ed. by James Downey, Ben Jones

Abstract

REVIEW S Fearful Joy, Papers from the Thomas Gray Bicentenary Conference at Carleton University, edited by James Downey and Ben Jones (Montreal: McGill-Queen's University Press, 1974). xvii, 266. $11.5 0 c o n t e n t s Alastair MacDonald, "For Thomas Gray, died 17 7 1" (poem of dedication); Jean H. Hagstrum, "Gray's Sensibility"; Ian Jack, "Gray in his Letters"; Clarence Tracy, "Melancholy Marked Him For Her Own"; Arthur Johnston, "Our Daring Bard"; Roger Lonsdale, "Gray and Johnson: The Biographical Problem"; Donald Greene, "The Proper Language of Poetry: Gray, Johnson, and Others"; Eli Mandel, "Theories of Voice in EighteenthCentury Poetry: Gray and Sm art"; Irene Tayler, "Two Eighteenth-Century Illustrators of Gray: Richard Bentley and William Blake"; Ben Jones, "Blakeon Gray: Outlines of Recognition"; Kenneth MacLean, "The Distant Way: Im­ agination and Image in Gray's Poetry"; George Whalley, "Thomas Gray: A Quiet Hellenist"; Alastair MacDonald, "Gray and his Critics: Patterns of Response in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries"; James Steele, "Thomas Gray and the Season for Triumph"; Louis Kampf, "The Humanist Tradition in Eighteenth-Century England - and Today"; Donald Davie, "A f­ terword" (a brief critique of the papers and conference proceedings). Ever since Thomas Gray's death in 1771 questions have been raised about his place in literature. Is he entitled to a niche in the first rank of English poets? Was he an academic recluse almost totally separated from reality? Why did he write so little? Why did Dr. Johnson despise him? Was he a true poet of nature? Did he ever fall in love? Are his expressions of feeling merely academic? Are his great Odes genuinely Pindaric? Why are they so obscure? Is not even the great Elegy trite, superficial, mawkish, and insincere? Did he possess a world vision? Are his letters in any way comparable with the epistolary classics of a Keats or a Gibbon? What did the illustrators make of his work? How have the critics treated him? Where does he stand today? The attractive volume published by McGill-Queen's Press to mark the bicentenary of the poet's death considers all these questions and several more. Some of the answers it provides are, perhaps unavoidably, equivocal. While there is fairly general acceptance of the traditional view that Gray was one of the great poets between Pope and Wordsworth, there are one or two disclaimers. Donald Greene, for instance, endorses most of the harsher verdicts of Dr. Johnson, and Roger Lonsdale, by suggesting that Johnson might have been English Studies in Canada, 1 , 1 (spring 1975) 112 "courageously refusing to be deluded by temporary poetic fashions and preoc­ cupations," comes precariously close to sitting on the fence. Several con­ tributors note that Gray was a somewhat fearful, inhibited personality, pathologically afraid of fire, sexually aberrant, and out of touch with public affairs. Only one, James Steele, states quite emphatically that Gray had an active interest in contemporary politics, and concludes that he was a stout supporter of Whig imperialism. The question of the paucity of his output has always troubled Gray's com­ mentators. In the effulgence of the Victorian period Edmund Gosse cited this as the most stringent argument against the poet's right to be considered one of the leading English men of letters, as though "the springs of originality in the brain of a great inventive genius are bound to bubble up more continuously and in fuller volume than could be confined within the narrow bounds of the poetry of Gray." He attributed the meagreness of his published work to "the sterility of the age" - a view that would no longer be tenable - and to "the east wind of discouragement steadily blowing across the poet's path," whatever that means, but he went on to argue that literary fecundity was only one measure of a writer's greatness, for "when we turn to what Gray actually wrote, although the bulk of it is small, we are amazed at the originality and variety, the freshness and vigour of the mind that worked thus tardily and in miniature. " It was certainly not for the thinness of his productivity that Johnson disliked him. For him, as Roger Lonsdale...