Article: Inglorious wordsworths.(FEATURE ARTICLE)(Critical essay)

Some 35 years ago I picked up a book on a remainder table for the princely sum of 99 cents with the bewildering title of Inglorious Wordsworths--a bit of cross-referential convolution that soared clear over top of my then 20-year-old head. Disentangling the title a little will be germane to our discussion here. In Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, the poet muses upon the undeveloped potentialities of the obscure bumpkins buried all around him; poor and isolated country folk whose circumscribed lives never raised the opportunity to develop and display worldly greatness or genius.

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"Full many a flower is born to ...

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