UNIVERSITA DEGLI STUDI DI PADOVA FACOLTA DI LETTERE E FILOSOFIA CORSO DI LAUREA IN LINGUE, LETTERATURE E CULTURE MODERNE Their lot forbad. Thomas Gray s Elegy written in a Country Churchyard Relatore: Chiar.ma Prof.ssa Paola Bottalla Laureanda: Giorgia Maria Righi Nr. Matr.: 524909/LCM A. A. 2007-2008
I. The Graveyard Poetry and Thomas Gray The earlier part of the 18 th century is often referred to as the Augustan Age. Several writers of the time used the expression themselves to indicate that they had as models those poets who lived in the Rome of Emperor Augustus (27 BC AD 14), which is to say Virgil, Horace and Ovid. This is also the reason why the period is sometimes called neoclassical, to indicate that writers and artists attempted to reproduce the formal perfection of the classics. This meant observing strict rules of metre and rhyme and only using proper poetic diction, a language removed from everyday language and only appropriate for poetry. Poetry was intellectual rather than emotional and aimed at classic perfection of form rather than the expression of feeling; poets like Pope saw themselves as exponents of human reason, not of human emotion, as romantic poets did. Although the period favoured classical rules, understanding over fancy, and form over content, subjective, meditative and emotional trends were also present. Towards the end of the century these trends culminated in what is often labelled as pre-romanticism, whose works are characterized by love of nature, interest in folklore, and a tendency to mystery and melancholy. Pre-romanticism is a general term applied to a number of developments in late 18 th century culture which are thought to have prepared the ground for Romanticism in its full sense. The most important constituents of pre-romanticism are the Sturm und Drang phase of German literature; the Primitivism of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Ossianism; the cult of sensibility in the sentimental novel; the sensationalism of the early Gothic novels; the revival of interest in old ballads and romances; the melancholy of English graveyard poetry. All these developments seem to have helped to give a new importance to subjective individual feelings. 1
The figure of Thomas Gray (1716-1771) can be seen at the crossroads between Classicism and Romanticism. 1 Like other writers of his time, Gray believed that echoing traditional poetry was not a negative action; for him it was, in fact, a sign of cultural competence, especially since Classical poetry offered the best models that could be followed, unattainable examples of excellence. Gray s idea of poetry was far from the later romantic concepts of originality and inspiration; in his opinion, succeeding generations were free to use the heritage of thought and expression that the preceding poets had left them and, in particular, they could build upon that fertile substratum left by the classical writers of Greece and Rome. 2 But Gray was also deeply interested in and, in fact, almost fascinated with, the concept of the sublime, showing, in that, a typical romantic inclination. It was his opinion that in poetry there should be an element of grandeur and of passion, able to convey a sort of terrifying pleasure. He was, in fact, by nature inclined to appreciate the wilder and more frightening manifestations of nature. 3 Still, while these feelings appear very close to the Romantics wonder and admiration towards Nature and, above all, towards wild Nature, there is an important difference between Gray and later poets. Gray believed that rules and patterns were necessary and should always dominate the work of art, even in the reproduction of the wilderness and starkness of Nature. His works are always carefully planned and thought upon, even those that may appear, using Wordsworth s words, a spontaneous overflow of powerful 1 See Morris Golden, Thomas Gray (Twayne Publishers, New York, 1964), in particular, the chapter Classical or Romantic?, pp. 127-145. 2 Luisa Conti Camaiora, Gray, Keats, Hopkins. Poetry and the Poetic Presence. Edizioni dell arco, Milano 1992, p. 13. 3 See letter XXXI of 16 th November, 1739 to Richard West, containing his description of the Alps on his way to the Grande Chartreuse is contained: I do not remember to have gone ten paces without an exclamation, that there was no restraining: Not a precipice, not a torrent, not a cliff, but is pregnant with religion and poetry. There are certain scenes that would awe an atheist into belief, without the help of other argument. (Letters of Thomas Gray. Selected with an introduction of John Beresford. London: Oxford University Press, 1925. 2
feelings. 4 As a matter of fact, Gray constructed his poems very carefully and paid much attention to the organization of rhyme, metre, image and thought. This meant a great deal to him, since he was constantly in search for perfect form. 5 During his youth, Gray was plunged into classical learning, from which is derived his love of ancient Greece and Rome, which was still increased by the time he spent in Italy with his friend Horace Walpole in 1739-1740 and which resulted in the fact that almost all his earliest poems were composed in Latin, a language he knew remarkably well and handled with exceptional ease and grace. The two great Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, both written in the early seventeen-fifties and published in 1757, were considered by him the summit of his poetic achievement; they were the works he wished to be remembered for. For almost a century English poets had been writing odes, modelling them on the odes of the Greek poet Pindar, but no poet until Gray had followed so closely Pindar s structure. However the content of these two odes was to bewilder his contemporaries, because it displays Gray s peculiarity, that is to say his capacity of presenting romantic ideas and features in works whose structure recalls and re-proposes classical compositions. In fact, in the first ode The Progress of Poesy Gray celebrates the poet s calling with some passages which anticipate the romantic movement 6 and in the second ode The Bard he describes a traditional episode during the final subjugation of Wales by English, showing his deep knowledge of English history and the study he had made of Welsh poetry, history and legend. 7 The appearance of romantic aspects even in classical forms like the odes is due to the fact that in middle age Gray began to feel another, completely different world calling him, 4 W. J. B. Owen, Wordsworth s Preface to Lyrical Ballads. Greenwood Press, Westport, Connecticut, 1979, p. 116. 5 Golden, pp. 46-47. 6 This prelude of Gray s romantic development is visible is some passages of the ode, such as: In climes beyond the solar road, / Where shaggy forms o er ice-built mountains roam, / The Muse has broke the twilight-gloom / To clear the shiv ring Nature s dull abode. / And oft, beneath the od rous shade / Of Chili s boundless forests laid, / She deigns to hear the savage Youth repeat / In loose numbers wildly sweet / Their feather-cintur d Choefs, and dusky Loves... ( The Progress of Poesy, 54-62) 7 R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Thomas Gray. Longmans Green, London, 1958, p. 17. 3
the world of the misty Celtic and Scandinavian past, the world celebrated in James Macpherson s Ossian s Songs, which Gray was among the first to welcome, in 1760. So Gray, like many of his contemporaries, fell under the spell of northern romanticism, which was to influence his later works that became more and more inclined to the romantic mood. The poets of the second half of the 18 th century, and the Graveyard poets in particular, present in their poems experiences such as folly, terror and rêverie, describe rural life and look for exotic places, like William Collins in Persian Eclogues or in Ode on the popular Superstitions of the Highlands of Scotland ; they also draw their inspiration from medieval life, as we can see in Thomas Warton s The Grave of King Arthur or from Welsh and Norwegian mythology, like Thomas Gray in The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin. Perhaps the most sensational case is that of James Macpherson s interest in Celtic mythology, which resulted in the fake Ossian s Songs, highly admired by William Blake. In the poems of the period, the poet is portrayed in the act of creating, which is often felt as an autobiographic process. The poet is often celebrated as an isolated hero or even as a victim: see for example the final versions of Thomas Gray s Elegy and The Bard, Macpherson s Ossian s Songs, Thomas Chatterton s Mynstrelles Songe and James Beattie s Minstrel 8. In this second half of the 18 th century, poets often substitute the heroic couplet with irregular groups of lines and with blank verse; they experiment much and also recover many features from preceding periods, such as the Spenserian stanza (eight five-foot iambic lines followed by an iambic line of six feet) from the Elizabethan age, and the ballad stanza. The Graveyard school of poetry includes a number of pre-romantic English poets of the 18 th century, although they were not in fact an organized group. These poets are 8 Storia della civiltà letteraria inglese. Vol. 2: Il Settecento, il Romanticismo, il Vittorianesimo. Edited by Franco Marenco, Torino, UTET, 1956. (p. 102). 4