ABSTRACT
As a poet, however, Gray was not influenced by Spenser. He is Spenserian (and Miltonic) in believing that ‘the language of the age is never the language of poetry’ (ed 1935, 1:142), but his diction is never Spenserian. Any Spenserian words he uses occur also in Milton or Dryden, Pope or Thomson. He does not write ‘Spenserian’ poems, in the sense that in subject, form, mode, meter, or diction one feels the presence of the earlier poet. Though he read intensively and widely, his ‘debts’ are casual. Very occasionally, in a passage involving personification or allegory, one might suspect a Spenserian debt; but in the ‘fury Passions’ section of the ‘Ode on…Eton College’ (61ff), for example, his debt is more immediately to Thomson’s Spring and ultimately to the Aeneid (6.273-81), and possibly to Dryden, Pope, and Statius. Gray is conscious of competing with other poets who have listed the passions in this way; he is not merely under the influence of Spenser.
