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

Criticism, Wntr, 1998 by Daniel E. White

At times, the Gray of the Miltonic sublime as the true Gray--the most meaningful and interesting--is hard to accept, and when we are told that what is remarkable about the Favourite Cat ode is "Gray's extraordinary success in. deflecting our attention from his personal poetic agon" (157), his success seems extraordinary indeed. Gleckner's analysis of the Elegy (126-33), in particular, is so "sharply focused" (132) as to exclude any mention of the "rude forefathers of the hamlet" who are in fact "each in his narrow cell for ever laid." Gleckner replaces them with West, too firmly accommodating the poem to his thesis: Gray's line 21, "For them no more the blazing hearth shall bum," becomes Gray Agonistes' "For [him] no more the blazing hearth shall bum" (129).

But Gleckner's narrative of Gray's career remains for the most part persuasive. Because of its intricacy and erudition, Gray Agonistes will be of interest primarily to Gray scholars and Miltonists, but its candid and rigorous examination of Gray's sexual anxieties and milieu will prove engaging to all students of the eighteenth century, of the history of sexuality, and of the poetics of (auto)biographical writing.