Rhyming with Reason: The Poetry of Thomas Gray

The book is an intensive exploration of the poetry of Thomas Gray in the context of his own century which is no longer regarded as a literary monolith. The false critical teleology of treating poets like Gray, Collins, Thomson and Cowper as precursors of romanticism is left out and it is stressed how these poets accepted with some reservations the current notions about poetry and continued to work within them though at the same time they considerably widened the emotional scope and responsiveness of the eighteenth century sensibility. Gray’s scholarly fastidiousness and conventional Augustan decorum alongwith his prolific letters have been taken into account while studying the poems. Apart from revealing his Augustan sensibility, the study shows that Gray was perfectly at home in the current poetic conventions and techniques and not always melancholy, pensive or meditative.