Thomas Gray and the Dedicatory Muse

I will be occupied here with one abiding question: what kingdom of the imagination does Thomas Gray wish to build? I do not think I can quite explain why he is the most disappointing poet of the English eighteenth century-disappointing, that is, in terms of what was expected of him-but I do hope to explore the nature of a failed enterprise that of its kind is unrivaled within the century. I attribute this failure to no cultural malaise, for it seems to me utterly and completely personal, nor do I propose that had Gray been born in the year he died (1771) he would have become another sort of poet, flourishing in and helping to create the poetic climate inhabited by Blake or Wordsworth or Coleridge. Rather, it appears, Gray could not fully serve the muse of his own dedication, the figure he deliberately wills into existence and to whom he devotes his powers. Though I draw no analytical or interpretive conclusions bearing upon Gray's poetry from the facts of his life, I think them conspicuous and in need of restating at the beginning of this inquiry. Thomas Gray was the fifth of twelve children born to Dorothy and Philip Gray and the only one to survive infancy. His father, given to occasional and brutal fits of insanity, abused his wife physically during the several decades of their marriage. Though she separated from him, Philip threatened to pursue her with all the vengeance possible, willing to ruin himself to undo her, and his only son. 1 She returned to him. Thomas attended Eton and then Cambridge, where he was to live most of his quiet bachelor existence in Peterhouse and Pembroke Colleges. At Eton he met Richard West and Horace Walpole. With the exception of his mother, West was the most beloved person in Gray's life, and the early death of this promising young man was a distinct and grievous loss to Gray. He died in 1742, the year of Gray's greatest productivity, though some of the work of that year was inspired neither by West's death nor Gray's anticipation of it. After 1742 he wrote poetry sporadically and passed the larger part of his life in various historical, literary, and scientific activities. Toward the end

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