CONTENTS:- Thomas Gray and his Age; Early Poems; An 'Essay' in Quatrains; Search for Tradition; Straying into Satire; Conclusion; Notes and References;
DESCRIPTION
The book is an intensive exploration of the poetry of Thomas Gray in the context of his own century which is no longer regarded as a literary monolith. The false critical teleogy of treating poets like Grya, Collins, Thomson and Cowper as precursorsof romanticism is left out and it is stressed how these poets accepted with some reservation the corrent notions about poetry and continued to work with them through at the same time they considerabely widened the emotional scope and responsiveness of the eighteenth century sensibility.
