Title: Thomas Gray : the progress of a poet /
Authors: McCarthy, B. Eugene, 1934-
Publisher: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press,
Year: 1997
Subjects: Gray, Thomas, Criticism and interpretation.
Abstract: "This book examines the whole body of work of the English poet Thomas Gray (1716-71) as a continuous development as poet. While it is not a biography, the study considers Gray's life in its examination of the poet's development. Author B. Eugene McCarthy studies Gray's correspondence, notebooks, and scholarship in order to read in effective context his poems - with attention to prosody - both in draft and in published forms. The study reveals that Gray has a great deal more purposeful design to his sense of himself as poet, scholar, and man than has previously been noticed. Gray manifested an increasingly coherent progress through his poetry, even in the apparently random notations in his commonplace notebooks, toward such culminating points as "The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," "The Progress of Poesy," "The Bard," and his Welsh and Norse studies.".