Thinking Activity: The Neoclassical Age
Major Writer of the Age
The Neo-Classical Age:
The Revolution of 1688, which banished the last of the Stuart kings and called William of Orange to the throne, marks the end of the long struggle for political freedom in England. Thereafter the Englishman spent his tremendous energy, which his forbears had largely spent in fighting for freedom, in endless political discussions and in efforts to improve his government. In order to bring about reforms, votes were now necessary; and to get votes the people of England must be approached with ideas, facts, arguments, information. So the newspaper was born,and literature in its widest sense, including the book, the newspaper, and the magazine, became the chief instrument of a nation's progress.
Social DevelopmentThe first half of the eighteenth century is remarkable for the rapid social development in England. Hitherto men had been more or less governed by the narrow, isolated standards of the Middle Ages, and when they differed they fell speedily to blows. Now for the first time they set themselves to the task of learning the art of living together, while still holding different opinions. In a single generation nearly two thousand public coffeehouses, each a center of sociability, sprang up in London alone, and the number of private clubs is quite as astonishing.
Major Writers of the Age:
Alexander Pope
Jonathan Swift
Joseph Addison
Samuel Johnson
Edmund Burke
Edward Gibbon
Thomas Gray
Oliver Goldsmith
William Cowper
Robert Burns
William Blake
Thomas Gray
Born: 26 December 1716
Died: 30 July 1771
"Poetry is thoughts that breathe and words that burn. "
- Thomas Gray
Thomas Gray was born in Cornhill, London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of 12 children, and the only child of Philip and Dorothy Gray to survive infancy.[1] He lived with his mother after she left
his abusive father. He was educated at Eton College where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and scholarly boy who spent his time reading and avoiding athletics. He lived in his uncle’s household rather than at college. He
made three close friends at Eton: Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Thomas Ashton, and Richard West, later to be appointed as Lord Chancellor of Ireland. The four prided themselves on their sense of style,sense of humour, and appreciation of beauty.In 1734 Gray went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge. He found the curriculum dull. He wrote letters to friends listing all the things he disliked: the masters ("mad with Pride") and the Fellows ("sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things.")
Intended by his family for the law, he spent most of his time as an undergraduate reading classical and modern
literature, and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation.
In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Walpole on his Grand Tour of Europe, possibly at Walpole's expense.
The two fell out and parted in Tuscany, because Walpole wanted to attend fashionable parties and Gray wanted to
visit all the antiquities. They were reconciled a few years later.
Major work:
The Bard: A Pindaric Ode.
Elegy written in a country churchyard
The Fatal sisters: An ode.
Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton college
Ode on spring
On the Death of Richard west
Thomas Gray (1716-1771), the poet, historian and scholar, who is best known as the author of 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard' (1751), was one of the first major literary figures to visit, and write about, the Lake District. Gray tried to make a tour of the region in 1767 but it had to be abandoned after his friend and travelling companion, Dr Thomas Wharton, became ill with asthma at Keswick. This brief encounter with the Lakeland landscape made a significant impression on Gray, who described the journey as 'charmed' and vowed to return 'at the first opportunity'.
"Thought would destroy their Paradise "-Thomas GraySuch an opportunity did not arise until two years later, in the autumn of 1769, but Wharton was again taken ill and forced to return home. This time, Gray elected to continue alone and on 30th September he set out on a 14-day tour of Cumberland, Westmorland and Yorkshire keeping a detailed written account for the benefit of his absent friend. This account, known as Gray's 'Journal of his Tour in the Lake District', was published posthumously in 1775 and became one of the eighteenth-century's most popular guides to the Lakes.
Elegy written in a country churchyard
"The paths of glory lead but to the grave."
-Thomas Gray
Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” presents the omniscient speaker who talks to the reader. First, he stands alone in a graveyard deep in thought. While there, he thinks about the dead people buried there. The graveyard referred to here is the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. The speaker contemplates the end of human life throughout the poem. He remarks on the inevitability of death that every individual has to face.
Besides mourning the loss of someone, the speaker in the elegy reminds the reader that all people will die one day. Death is an unavoidable and natural thing in everyone’s life. When one dies today, tomorrow, a stranger will see the person’s tombstone. Out of curiosity, he will ask about the person buried there to a villager. The villager will reply that he knew the man. He would add that he had seen him in various spots. Sometimes, he will also remark that he had stopped seeing the man one day, and then there was the tombstone.
In the poem, Gray, the poet himself, writes the epitaph of his own. He says that his life is full of sadness and depression. However, he feels proud of his knowledge. He calls it incomparable. In addition to this, he says that ‘No one is perfect in this world.’ So, he asks the reader not to judge anyone in the graveyard. Each and every soul is different and takes rest for eternity in the graveyard. In conclusion, the poet, through the speaker, ends the elegy by saying that death is an inevitable event in this world. Also, he says that man’s efforts and his struggles to succeed in life comes to an end in death. Thus, death conquers man regardless of his successes and/or failures in his endeavors during his life.
Critic review:
Critical analysis of the poem Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard by Thomas Gray"
Dr. JR. Jha
Hod English
Among the most famous and finest elegies in English Literatures '
Elegy written in a country churchyard' remains immortal. 'Elegy
written in a Country Churchyard' was penned down by Thomas Gray
and it is completed around Seven Years. the poem was contemplated
upon the village of stokes pages after the death of gray's school friend
'Richard West' and hence the Gray. West is the obscure young person
who died with his ambition unfulfilled.
Death the over reaching is the main theme in Elegy Written in
a country Churchyard, is the inevitable fate of humanity
regardless of wealth, power, and status. Once the poet visited a
country Churchyard, where he saw the graves of the forefathers
of the village seeing their graves, he was moved to sympathy
for them and set to writing this poem in their honour. Thus the
poem was inspired by the poet's visit to a country Churchyard,
So the title is 'Elegy written in a Country Churchyard'.
Gray's elegy deals with the short and simple annals of the poor.
In fact it gives a complete picture of the life and history of the
poor people living in the villages. They worked hard on their
fields all day. When it was evening they walked wearily home
with their team of Oxen. When their children and wives saw
them coming, they cook food for them. But they are dead now
and can no longer to enjoy homely joys. They can no longer to
enjoy the sweet smell of the morning breeze and they can no
longer to enjoy the swallows. The house fire no longer to
burns for them. And their wives and children no longer to wait
for them in the evening.
These people were strong study fellows. They could plough the
hardest ground. Even the biggest tree fell to the strong stroke of
their axes. Some of them were capable of ruling an empire, and
some of them were great musicians. But because of their
poverty, they did not get the opportunity to prove their work.
Some of these people were brave and fearless like Hampden.
Some of them were well learned like Milton. And some of them
were as heroic as Cromwell. But they did not get the
opportunity to show their worth.
Those who ambitious to become famous shed a lot of blood to
rise to power. Because these people had no such ambitions, they
were saved from living a life of sinful pleasures. They lived
away from the madding crowd of corrupt people. They lived a
peaceful and contended life. These people are worthy of our
respect.
Thomas Gray on W. J. Long Book:
Gray's Letters, published in 1775, are excellent reading, and his Journal is still a model of natural description; but it is to a single small volume of poems that he owes his fame and his place in literature. These poems divide themselves naturally into three periods, in which we may trace the progress of Gray's emancipation from the classic rules which had so long governed English literature. In the first period he wrote several minor poems, of which the best are his "Hymn to Adversity" and the odes "To Spring" and "On a Distant Prospect of Eton College." These early poems reveal two suggestive things: first, the appearance of that melancholy which characterizes all the poetry of the period; and second, the study of nature, not for its own beauty or truth, but rather as a suitable background for the play of human emotions.
The second period shows the same tendencies more strongly developed. The "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750), the most perfect poem of the age, belongs to this period. To read Milton's "Il Penseroso" and Gray's "Elegy" is to see the beginning and the perfection of that "literature of melancholy" which largely occupied English poets for more than a century. Two other well-known poems of this second period are the Pindaric odes, "The Progress of Poesy" and "The Bard." The first is strongly suggestive of Dryden's "Alexander's Feast," but shows Milton's influence in a greater melody and variety of expression. "The Bard" is, in every way, more romantic and original. An old minstrel, the last of the Welsh singers, halts King Edward and his army in a wild mountain pass, and with fine poetic frenzy prophesies the terror and desolation which must ever follow the tyrant. From its first line, "Ruin seize thee, ruthless King!" to the end, when the old bard plunges from his lofty crag and disappears in the river's flood, the poem thrills with the fire of an ancient and noble race of men. It breaks absolutely with the classical school and proclaims a literary declaration of independence.
In the third period Gray turns momentarily from his Welsh material and reveals a new field of romantic interest in two Norse poems, "The Fatal Sisters" and "The Descent of Odin" (1761). Gray translated his material from the Latin, and though these two poems lack much of the elemental strength and grandeur of the Norse sagas, they are remarkable for calling attention to the unused wealth of literary material that was hidden in Northern mythologv. To Gray and to Percy (who published his Northern Antiquities in 1770) is due in large measure the profound interest in the old Norse sagas which has continued to our own day.
Taken together, Gray's works form a most interesting commentary on the varied life of the eighteenth century. He was a scholar, familiar with all the intellectual interests of his age, and his work has much of the precision and polish of the classical school; but he shares also the reawakened interest in nature, in common man, and in mediæval culture, and his work is generally romantic both in style and in spirit. The same conflict between the classic and romantic schools, and the triumph of Romanticism, is shown clearly in the most versatile of Gray's contemporaries, Oliver Goldsmith.
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