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Article: Thomas Gray: A Life.(Review)
- Article from:
- New Criterion
- Article date:
- January 1, 2001
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2001 Foundation for Cultural Review. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Robert L. Mack Thomas Gray: A Life. Yale University Press, 701 pages, $39.95
One of the most important facts about Thomas Gray (1716-1771) is that he was the only one of his parents' twelve children to survive into adulthood, and survival is a recurrent theme in his poetry. The "Elegy" is spoken by a solitary man who turns the poem into his own epitaph. The "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" depicts its "little victims" as happily ignorant of the world that awaits them, into which they might prefer not to grow up; it is preoccupied with the "fearful joy" of breaking bounds, yet the boys "disdain/The limits of their little reign" only to come up against ...