Elegy unto epitaph: Print culture and commenorative practice in Gray's "elegy written in a country churchyard"

Papers on Language and Literature, Winter 2002 by Sharp, Michele Turner

A quick survey of the discussion surrounding Gray's famous elegy reveals considerable disagreement about the most fundamental aspects of the poem. Critics have bent their energies to determining what or whom the poem is really about, to sketching the dimensions of the speaker's emotive or ethical response to the loss of this albeit elusive object, and to assessing the rapport between speaker and poet.

For Gray's first biographer, William Mason, the poem centered on the poet's sorrow for the loss of his dear friend, Richard West. Mason, thus, suggested in his Memoir that the poem was begun, if not completed in its original version, shortly after West's death. Horace Walpole, who received a finished poem in 1750, disagreed with Mason about when Gray began his poem, and two centuries of critical debate has ensued. Gray's 201 century biographer, R. W. KettonCremer, for example, sides with Walpole about the date, but he agrees with Mason that the poem's original motivation "must surely have been the death of West." Ketton-Cremer notes, however, that the "Elegy" "transcends the private sorrows of its writer" (98). Eugene McCarthy likewise argues that West's death is a vital, though not exhaustive, context for the "Elegy." Other readers have imposed ever-widening frames for the poet's grief. Lonsdale, for example, whose notes to the poem handle the dating argument with convincing dispatch, believes that the real heart of the "Elegy" is the poet's own struggle to find an idiom within which to frame a new kind of self, one that is deeper, confused, and driven by subversive passions (Poems 22). Taking a different tack, Henry Weinfield argues that the "Elegy " confronts and is shaped by the problem of history, one of whose most compelling manifestations for the poet is the obscure anonymity into which poets and poems must fall in an age no longer heroic. The result is a poem that foregrounds the dissolution of the pastoral idiom in a way that makes the "Elegy" the antithesis of elegy proper. If the "Elegy" is (still) an elegy, it is because it mourns the impossibility of being an elegy in a more restricted sense, writes Weinfield (120). For Suvir Kaul, the "Elegy" mourns its poet's vexed attempt to mark out a place for himself or his poem beyond the pale of history or above the logic of commodities. Taking particular issue with John Sitter's argument that the "Elegy," like much mid-century poetry, maps a flight from history, Kaul argues that the "Elegy" is a site where "particular versions of English history" take tenacious hold of both poem and poet. What seems to be a"defensive refiguration" or retreat is in fact an "offensive strategy" in which the poet voices a high culture protest to the rising tide of bourgeois values that neither poet nor poem can contest is any real way (149). The result, for Kaul, is a poem riven by its own necessary failure to articulate a free and secure value for itself independent of commodity culture, and in which pathos intervenes to gloss the socio-cultural contradictions that it cannot resolve (127).