Thomas Gray 1716-1771

Although in his day Thomas Gray was considered England's foremost poet, he turned down the posi­tion of poet laureate. He is remembered today chiefly as the author of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard."

Gray was the only surviving child in a family of eight. By keeping shop, his mother earned the money to send him through Eton and Cambridge. After a three-year Continental tour with his former classmate and fellow writer, Horace Walpole, Gray settled in cloistered bachelor retirement at Cam­bridge, where he was a scholar of classical litera­ture, a well-liked don, and a poet in residence. He enjoyed the quiet life of a Cambridge professor. On one occasion, however, a practical joke so shat­tered his nerves and disrupted the "noiseless tenor" of his ways that he moved to another of Cambridge's several colleges —a change which for him was a cataclysmic upheaval.

Although Gray's life was placid, his poetry was venturesome. Without discarding what he believed was good in the old, neoclassic tradition, he ex­plored new and unfamiliar areas in poetry. His use of personification, high-flown allusions, and con­ventional poetic diction are representative of his ties to the earlier style. But while Pope reflected fashionable city tastes, Gray, like Wordsworth and other Romantic poets, turned to country life and humble people for inspiration. He dealt in honest and homely emotion and brought back into poetry the use of the first-person singular, considered a barbarism by eighteenth-century norms, which dictated suppression of the ego and concealment of emotion. Not only Gray's treatment of nature, but his interest in the past, in Celtic and Norse folk­lore and simple, primitive cultures, has been seen as a foreshadowing of themes that would find their fullest expression in the Romantic movement of the nineteenth century. But Gray can be appreci­ated on his own terms, free from theories about his preparing the way for the Romantic period.

A painstaking writer, Gray produced few poems. It took him nine years to complete "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard." Samuel Johnson may have thought Gray dull, but most readers agreed with General Wolfe, who before the battle of Quebec in 1759, said of the "Elegy": "I would rather be the author of those lines than take Quebec."

The term elegy, first used to describe any serious meditative poem, is now used to refer to a poem that laments the death of a particular person. Gray's poem laments the passing of all people, but ends with an epitaph for a particular person, and is thus an elegy in both senses.

Robert Burns 1759-1796

Tired and hungry, a traveler arrived one night at an inn in the heart of the Burns country. The place was alive with lights and laughter. When the trav­eler knocked, he got no answer. He tried shouting and banging, and finally resorted to the colorful rhetoric of an outraged Scotsman. Finally a win­dow opened and a servant peered out and ex­plained, "Oh, sir, Bobbie Burns is ben." When the celebrated Bobbie Burns was "ben" (within), it was understood that no one else should expect atten­tion.

Even to this day "Bobbie Burns" is a magic name, one which kindles the loyalty and pride of his compatriots. Burns, the oldest of seven chil­dren, was born near Ayr, in southwestern Scotland, in a two-room cottage his father had built with his own hands. Although the family's poverty made possible only a meager education, Burns, according to Thomas Carlyle, "was fortunate in his father— a man of thoughtful, intense character . . . valuing knowledge, possessing some, and open-minded for more." It was from his father that Burns received most of his learning and his avid love for books. He supplemented his formal schooling by reading the Bible, The Spectator, and Pope's poems. His mother taught him old Scottish songs and stories, which he later turned into his best poems. He pored over small volumes of ballads when driving his cart or walking to the fields. His early life as a plowboy, he wrote, combined "the cheerless gloom of a hermit with the unceasing moil of a galley slave"; but his recollections of this life in his po­etry, and particularly his love songs, reveal that his youth was not all toil and moil.

Burns developed into a handsome young man, but his wild ways and his verse satirizing local dig­nitaries made many enemies. At twenty-six—his father dead, the farm a failure, and his romance with Jean Armour blocked by her angry father — Burns was ready to flee to Jamaica to start a 'new life. To raise money for his passage, friends helped him to publish his first volume of poetry, called Poems: Chiefly in Scottish Dialect (1786). It was an immediate success. One contemporary claimed that "the country murmured of him from sea to sea .. . old and young, grave and gay, learned and igno rant, were all alike transported." Canceling his trir to the West Indies, Burns went instead to Edin burgh where he was lionized, but where his peas­ant roughness soon jarred the refined sensibilities of polite society. When his novelty wore off, he took the £400 received from the publication of an enlarged edition of his book and toured- Scotland and northern England collecting ballads. He then returned to his farm, married Jean Armour, and wrote some of his finest poetry. To supplement his meager income, he served as tax collector, a job he nearly lost because of his bold and outspoken ad­vocacy of the principles of the French Revolution. His last years were clouded by ill health brought on by the chronic rheumatic heart condition that eventually killed him at the early age of thirty-seven. Upon his death, the whole country united to honor him and to contribute to the support of his destitute family. The recognition that had been only fleeting during his brief, unhappy lifetime flowered into lasting fame, and Burns was hailed as the national poet of Scotland. He was beloved by the Scottish people because, in their own idiom, he exalted and gave new dignity to the simple aspects of their lives.

William Blake 1757-1827

One of William Blake's earlier biographers called him the "most spiritual of artists." The description still stands. Matter-of-fact objectors have called Blake mad; in recent years critics, while admitting his eccentricity, have elevated him as a major prophet — not only of the Romantic movement, but of the revolt against the mechanical tyranny of the modern world. It is said that Blake is only nega­tively related to the eighteenth century. Yet both as a revolutionary and a mystic, Blake was in his lonely way a child of his time. His revolt was against the intellectual patternmaking of the eight­eenth century. His achievement — unrecognized in his own time—was a breakthrough into the Ro­mantic Movement.

Blake received little formal education, but his fa­ther, a poor tradesman, kept him well supplied with books and prints of great paintings. At the age of ten, Blake expressed a desire to be a painter and was sent to drawing school and then apprenticed to an engraver. It was during this period that he first began experimenting with verse, thus embarking upon the two separate careers that he would even­tually make one. As a child, Blake had strangely in­tense religious experiences. He once reported seeing a tree filled with angels and, on another occasion, he saw the prophet Ezekiel under a tree in a field. To Blake the next world was as real as this one. Seeing God at his window was not, for him, un­usual Solitary by ordinary standards, Blake was surrounded from within by his own visitors. His devoted wife once said, "I have very little of Mr. Blake's company. He is always in Paradise."

Blake's trade as an engraver was an important means of livelihood, for his pictures and his poetry were not widely accepted during his lifetime His talent for sketching is seen in his illustrations not only of his own poems but of specially decorated editions of Milton's Paradise Lost, Dante's Divine Comedy, and the Book of Job. All his life Blake devoted himself to expressing his mystical faith and his visions of a heavenly world. His concern, in both art and poetry, was to represent eternal things in terms of earthly symbols!

"Without contraries," wrote Blake, "there is no progression." His life and work are a confusion of contraries: infinite patience and painstaking work­manship in the dawn of the Industrial Age; the damning of "mind-forged manacles" m an age of rules; emotion in an age of reason; other-worldly presences involved in this world's work; genius called madness. His Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, two fanciful works which appealed so much to later Romantic poets, are also studies in contrast. In these two works, this great poet of contraries pointed out the need for both child­hood's innocence and the wisdom — however pain­ful and disillusioning —gained by experience Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, though not appreciated until some fifty years after his death, contain some of the most beautiful lyrics in the English language."

The greatness of Blake lies less, perhaps, in his apocalyptic outlook than in his mastery, in art and verse, of an extreme and moving simplicity Wil­liam Wordsworth commented perceptively on this extraordinary artist and writer when he noted: "There is something in the madness of this man which interests me more than the sanity of Lord Byron or Walter Scott."