The Poet and the Publisher in Thomas Gray's Correspondence

Thomas Gray’s Sensibility and the Sublimity of Reserve

“…4 Indeed, and although Gray himself seems to have worked through outbursts of concentration rather than regular polishing, the composition of the Elegy may have spread over as much as eight years, and the Pindaric odes-which he did intend to publish from the outset-remained in progress from 1752 to 1757. That such deliberation in writing did not preclude at least some sense of literary authority is borne out by Gray's haughty choice of a Greek epigraph for the Odes (Pindar's φωνᾶντα συνετοῖσιν, Gray 1969, 161; translated as "vocal to the Intelligent alone," Gray 1935, II: 797), as well as by the fact that the throwaway "Simple Story" was the only previously published poem he retrenched from the 1768 edition, precisely on grounds of literary decorum (for a fuller reappraisal of Gray's attitudes to print, see Thomson 1998).…”

“…Traditional representations of Gray as a mute or strangled poet have been qualified and questioned in various ways over the past three decades (Weinfield 1991;McGann 1996;Thomson 1998;Garrison 2009;Turner 2015). The aim of the present article is to further this reassessment, by focusing on three interrelated aspects of Gray's paradoxical (and transitional) status in literary history.…”