“Approach and Read”: Gray's Elegy, Print Culture, and Authorial Identity

Despite the smooth, monumental surface of its verse, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard presents an oddly fractured jumble of poetic forms, voices, and positions. The poem oscillates throughout between the first person and general reflection; an idealized communal portrait of the “Forefathers” and a lament over their lost individuality; and celebration or restraint of individual ambition generally. Most strangely of all, the poetic form abruptly fractures in the “for thee” of line 93, as the poem turns back upon itself to address its own initial narrator as the object of its concluding third-person epitaph. This tension of different poetic voices and positions in the text has been read by critics in a number of ways: as demonstrating Gray's inability to “speak out”; as representing the contrasting “public” and “private” voices in Grays poetry generally; as an expression of his feelings of isolation after the death of his closest friend and confidant, Richard West, in 1742; and as an expression of his repressed sexual feelings for other men. ¹ In this chapter, I will read the Elegy's formal and thematic disjunctions as a reflection of Grays ambivalent authorial identity and relationship to commercial print culture. ²