Thomas Gray as a Romantic Poet - Questionpurs

Evaluate Thomas Gray as a poet on the basis of the poem you have read

Gray began as a classicist and ended as a romanticist. He began in the tradition of Dryden and Pope but ended in the style and manner of Wordsworth. The early poems of Gray viz. The Ode on Spring. Ode on Distant Prospect of Eton College, Hymn to Adversity composed before 1742 have nothing in the spirit of Romanticism. They are characterised by all those qualities which are associated with the poetry of the Pope.

Thomas Gray as a Romantic Poet

They are genuine products of the Augustan Age. In them the elements of Classicism such as personification, allegory, moralising, and artificial diction are present in a mark be the supreme representative of the classical school of English poetry by presenting in his poetry all that the classical poets of English wanted to have. In Pope, we do not have the qualities of the romantic poets of the 19th century who have been considered the true poets of England.

In the words of Edmund Gosse, " Pope may not have romance, the spirituality of mystery; but in the lower provinces, there is perhaps no single writer who showers fine things about him with such prodigality of wit, or dazzles us so much with the mere exercise of his intelligence. " Pope tried to follow as best as he could the classical masters like Vigil and Homer.

He made attempts to borrow matter from the classics and tread in the footsteps of the classical writers. But, " at best he could give us only a mock-heroic epic. " Not only did Pope seek to get the matter from the ancients, but also tried to achieve correctness in his style by imitating their versification. It became the object of the Pope to introduce in English poetry the diction and language of the ancients, his real aim was to achieve literary glory by following in the footsteps of the classical poets.

In the heroic couplet, Pope tried to have as much classical expression as possible. Pope sought to model his style in conformity with the ancient writers of Greece and Rome. For all that he was greatly indebted to the classics, and imitating the older classical poets he became the classic of his own age. 

Gray's gradual march towards romanticism

Gray's next work shows him well on the way towards Romanticism.

In 1754 he wrote The Progress of Poesy and the same year began The Bard which he finished in 1757. These are odes that make Gray's romantic. They are the most imaginative poems of Gray, and they were distinctly in advance of the Age. Here Gray did not follow the beaten track of Classicism but made vast deviations and thereby offended the public taste. The odes were ridiculed by Dr Johnson because they violated the true classical spirit, criticising these odes observed, " These odes are made by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments, they strike rather than please; the images are magnified by affectation; the language is laboured into harshness.

The mind of the writer seems to work with unnatural violence. " Goldsmith, who was more classical than romantic, also felt dissatisfied with these two modes, and criticised them in the following words, " These two oddes it must be confessed, breath much of the spirit of Pindar, but then they have caught the seeming obscurity, the sudden transition, and the hazardous either of his mighty master, all which, though evidently intended for beauties, will probably be regarded as blemishes by the majority of readers.

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