Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship. - book reviews

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Daniel E. White

Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship by Robert F. Gleckner. Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Pp. x 231. $45.00.

With Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship, Robert F. Gleckner takes up anew the issues of poetic influence and agon that have occupied the better part of his career. His last monograph, Blake and Spenser (1985), his "Joyce's Blake: Paths of Influence" (William Blake and the Moderns, 1982), his earlier article in the pages of this journal, "Blake, Gray, and the Illustrations" (1977), and his still justly respected The Piper and the Bard: A Study of William Blake (1957), indicate the abiding strength of Gleckner's interest in what he has long called "significant allusion." In this his most recent book Gleckner defines the "notion" as allusion "reasonably verifiable by the total thrust of the poem into which it has been imported as evoking its original context, not merely its dictional felicitousness or even its linguistic appropriateness to that poem's general tenor or subject" (154). In Blake and Spenser, Gleckner's introductory discussion of Blake's illustrations to Gray's Poems presented Blake as the model artist whose agonistic relation to Spenser provided that kind of fertile "melange" of "significant allusions" to which Gleckner has persistently addressed his energy and learning. Gray, at the time, was of less interest: "From the pattern of his allusions to Spenser as well as to other poets, contemporary and early, it is dear that Grays purpose in such allusions ... was to incorporate in his own poetry le mot juste, what was ne'er so well expressed ..." (Blake and Spenser 13). Now, however, Gray's "brilliant poetic and allusional strategies" (8) and "allusive depths" (185) reveal to Gleckner's keen eye a subtextual double narrative of agon and anxiety in Gray's "relationships" with Milton and Richard West. Gray Agonistes thus represents both a logical step in Gleckner's career and the welcome fruition of that exciting strain of historicist Gray criticism advanced by Raymond Bentman, George Haggerty, Jean Hagstrum, Wallace Jackson, Suvir Kaul, and, to a certain extent, G. S. Rousseau.

This is a book with a story to tell, and Gleckner is candid about the nature of his endeavor: "I am not unwilling that what follows be received as something like a psychobiography" (16). His italics are apt, since Gray Agonistes is in fact a satisfying piece of criticism that combines impressive scholarship with tightly focused--sometimes overly so--close readings. But its aim is less to leave readers with new interpretations of individual poems than to offer a new understanding of the poet and his career: "my intention [is] to illuminate not so much Gray's life as Gray's life in his poetry, not so much Gray as man but Gray as poet seeing himself as a man, not so much Gray's psyche as his imaginative reflections and representations of that psyche in the poetry, of which it is fundamentally constitutive" (16). Despite these early distinctions, Gray Agonistes often does attempt to see into the emotional life of "Gray as man," and the title, taken from Hagstrum's "Gray's Sensibility"--"The true man was Gray Agonistes"--suggests the critical character of the project. Gleckner consequently "eschew[s] an elaborate skein of theoretical underpinnings from Freud or Foucault or Lacan or Irigaray or Kristeva--or from other related, oft-quoted authorities" (16), and the result is a sometimes frustrating, sometimes refreshing, biographical rhetoric that produces a rich analysis of Gray's career in light of what Gleckner's supple intellect has come to understand of Gray's agonistic poetic and epistolary writings, his conflicted narratives of personal and poetic hopes and fears.

The story that emerges from Gray's poems and letters is thus "a double narrative of interlocking 'personal histories': (1) his heroic engagement with the reigning power of Milton's achievement and with his precedential model for a literary career, both fueling Gray's drive toward the status of Poet in his own right, not of mere Miltonic imitator; and (2) his equally heroic struggle to come to terms with his own sexuality, with his love for West, with his all-absorbing grief at West's early death, and finally with his late-life love of, and abandonment by, Bonstetten" (7). Following the introduction, the book accordingly sets out "The Miltonic Background," as Chapter 2 is called, followed by two chapters on Gray's relationship with West, their correspondence, and the meaning of the Quadruple Alliance during and after the edenic Eton days: "Gray, West, and Epistolary Encoding" and "Gray, West, Walpole, and the Letters." Having set up this dual structure, Gleckner then in four consecutive chapters ("The Poems" I, II, III, and IV) takes the reader through Gray's career as it is constituted by the ways in which Gray's two personal narratives "interlock, intersect, interanimate with, even at times serve as surrogates (or metonymies) for, each other" (8).