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 the unavoidable border between life and death. The sonnet (famously, and unfairly, censured by Wordsworth) on the premature death of Gray’s closest friend, Richard West—who was also his parents’ only surviving child—laments the desolation of the bereaved person surrounded by heartlessly burgeoning Nature. “The Bard” narrates an encounter between Edward I and the last living Welsh bard, whose fellows have all been slaughtered at the king’s command, and who, having prophesied the overthrow of Edward’s Plantagenet successors, commits suicide with the words “Be thine Despair, and scept’red Care,/ To triumph, and to die, are mine.” Death is triumph because it brings poetic immortality, the only survival on which we can depend. “You see,” Gray wrote to West in 1742, referring to his studies, “that I converse, as usual, with none but the dead: they are my old friends, and almost make me long to be with them.” West nobly replied, “What, are there no joys among the living?” A month later he was dead himself, and his question echoed through the remaining thirty years of Gray’s life.

The accidents of survival also set the course of our knowledge of Gray. His literary executor and first biographer, the Rev. William Mason, abetted by Horace Walpole, who ought to have known better, destroyed many documents and censored others. The hitherto standard biography by R. W. Ketton-Cremer (1955) is outdated and relentlessly dull. Thankfully, it is now superseded by Mack’s engrossing, if sometimes over-elaborate, volume. Drawing on the excellent book by Robert F. Gleckner, Gray Agonistes: Thomas Gray and Masculine Friendship (1997), Mack temperately argues the case for homoerotic allusions in Gray’s work, handling the topic, which was confined by Ketton-Cremer to dark hints about “secrets” and “temptations,” with an admirable sense of proportion. Acknowledging the dangers of “imposing the restless categories of our own culture on the past,” he recognizes that Gray’s strength as a man and a writer lies as much in his reticences, hesitations, and silences as in his confessions and published utterances. Mack remarks upon the “simultaneous accessibility and inscrutability” of the “Elegy”: the phrase is equally apt for its author, who wrote to West in another letter that “to me there hardly appears to be any medium between a public life and a private one.”

On both sides of his family Gray was of middle-class mercantile stock. His childhood, about which we know little, was overshadowed by the violent temper of his father, Philip, a scrivener and exchange broker whose wife left him and later attempted to obtain a legal separation because of his physical abuse of her and, by inference, their children. In 1725 Thomas, still not quite nine years old, was sent to Eton where his uncle was a master; he was to remain there for nearly ten years. With only four hours of lessons a day (largely Latin and Greek), frequent holidays, no set bedtimes, and no organized games, the onus was on the individual pupil to make the best use of his freedom. Gray’s letters home were among the casualties of Mason’s censorship, but he and three other boys, West, Wal- pole, and Thomas Ashton, formed a distinct set, the “Quadruple Alliance,” aesthetic and dreamily introverted in character, and drawn together by common experience of disturbed domestic backgrounds. The “Eton Ode,” as Mack says, is not straight autobiography but “a reinterpretation, a poetic palimpsest,” the kind of cento (a multiply allusive composition) which Gray learned in the schoolroom and the form in which all his best work was done. Mack interestingly connects this technique with the epistemology of Locke, to which Gray adhered; the cento is “the literary-textual equivalent of the similarly acquisitive, recombinative workings of the human mind,” although Gray’s fusion of elements seems less mechanical than Locke’s model. In similar vein, Mack urges the proto-romantic character of Gray’s travel writing, both on his Grand Tour with Walpole in 1739–41 and in his visit to the Lake District in 1768–9, persuasively claiming for it the power to “half perceive” and “half-create” the scenes it evokes with rapid notations in a manner worthy of Wordsworth or Ruskin.

In 1734 Gray proceeded to Cambridge, then still such a backwater that there was no daily postal link with London. There were only four hundred undergraduates—yet the same number of fellows. Cambridge was to be the center of Gray’s life henceforward. He became a Fellow of Peterhouse, his old college, in 1742, transferring to Pembroke in 1756 after some drunken students cruelly exploited his pyrophobia—rooted, Mack intriguingly suggests, in a subconscious symbolic association of flames with destructive, uncontrolled passion—by falsely raising the cry of “Fire!” in the small hours one morning. Gray was appointed Professor of Modern History in 1768, and “constantly intended,” in Mason’s words, “to read lectures,” but never did; he knew too much to know where to begin. Instead he amassed fabled quantities of learning. “To be employed,” he revealingly wrote, “is to be happy”; work distracted him from the melancholy which deepened with the years. He projected a history of English poetry, which led him to the study of Old English, Old Norse, Old High German, and Welsh in an attempt to discern the origins of meter. In “The Progress of Poesy,” he produced one of the best English poems modeled on the notoriously taxing Pindaric ode. For “The Bard” he steeped himself in Celtic folklore; he was suspicious of the forgeries of Ossian, though longing to believe them genuine. Mack emphasizes the formal experimentation of Gray’s later work, which he compares to The Waste Land in its radicalism and startling appropriation of existing materials. The suggestion that we should see Gray as a precursor of Eliot is bracingly unusual, and quite compatible with Mack’s insistence that Gray’s is “a coherent body of work every echo of which seeks its response to a referentially similar moment elsewhere”; for, after all, that applies to Eliot too.

One of the virtues of Mack’s biography is that he directs us to less frequented areas of Gray’s work. I have already mentioned his advocacy of the travel writing. Another aspect, from which our monolingual culture threatens to cut us off, is Gray’s Latin poems, which Mack sees as among his finest achievements. The “Alcaic Ode” which he wrote in the visitors’ book of the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse (so much better than Matthew Arnold’s verses on a similar occasion!), his translation of the first poem in Book II of Propertius’ Elegies, and his Epistle from Sophonisba to Masinissa, call forth particularly acute commentaries from Mack, who follows Gleckner in seeing the freedom and allusiveness of the Latin poems as furnishing a code in which Gray could hint at his feelings for West. Strikingly, Gray as translator tended to leave the classical epic alone; though he rendered passages from Statius, Dante, and Tasso, he was temperamentally drawn to quieter voices and less marmoreal forms.

In 1769, when Gray was fifty-three, his emotional life was briefly rejuvenated by a meeting with Charles Victor de Bonstetten, a twenty-four-year-old Swiss in England to improve his grasp of the language. Bonstetten, the son of a minor aristocrat, was vivacious, dashing, and impulsive, and venerated Gray as a poet and scholar. Gray, for his part, was so strongly reminded of the young West that he invited Bonstetten to Cambridge. Soon they were spending much of each day together reading English poetry and studying. What had been intended as a brief visit stretched over three months.

More than sixty years later, Bonstetten described Cambridge, in his memoirs, as a “désert du coeur” in which the springs of the poet’s imagination and feelings had run dry; eloquent and stimulating on so many subjects, Gray refused to discuss either his poetry or his past. Bonstetten concluded that “Gray n’avait jamais aimé … il en était résulté une misère du coeur”—not, as Mack mistranslates, “a miser of the heart” but a pitiable atrophying of the capacity for emotion. His melancholy, Bonstetten astutely saw, stemmed from “un besoin non-satisfait de la sensibilité.” It may be questioned, however, whether Gray “had never loved.” Johnson, in so many ways antipathetic to him, judged more truly in saying that “he was a man likely to love much where he loved at all.” Gray’s silence in the face of his eager young friend’s questionings may have been due to an excess of emotion rather than a deficiency.

Mack does not force the issue—there is no evidence that Gray’s feelings, for Bonstetten or for West, were ever more than platonic—but his point, that Gray had welcomed the opportunity to view the world awhile through the eyes of youthful enthusiasm and ingenuous optimism, is entirely fair. Three of Gray’s letters to Bonstetten survive, though not the replies; they contain such remarks as “I am grown old in the compass of less than three weeks,” “I did not conceive till now (I own) what it was to lose you,” “My life now is but a perpetual conversation with your shadow,” and “I can not bear this place [Cambridge] since you left me.”

As time wore on, the ache diminished; the past became safely past once more, able to be contained and regulated. In the Lake District, Gray had taken a Claude Lorraine glass through which, to use Mack’s words, “the various and disparate elements of the greater landscape” could be drawn into a “perceptual whole,” then to be further composed through Gray’s “patient, considered prose.” This can serve as a symbol for Gray’s artistic technique as a whole. Like the Etonian schoolboys in his poem, he could only feel really free within a definite framework.

A projected visit to Bonstetten in Switzerland never materialized, and Gray died of uremia in Cambridge on 30 July 1771. How did he view his own survival after death? His lifelong detestation of rationalism and skepticism—Hume was “pernicious,” and as for Voltaire, “No one knows the mischief that man will do”—supply hints, although he remained characteristically reticent about religion. The remark of his friend James Brown, “He never spoke out,” which Arnold made the leitmotif for his essay on Gray, is not as misleading as Mack believes. He was a private man, and even now keeps many secrets. He remains for most readers the author of the “Elegy,” and perhaps of the Eton “Ode,” the glories of a poetic output which numbers barely fifty items. In the days when such things were prized he was also known as one of the great letter writers. His learning, acquired for ambitious literary projects that remained not only uncompleted but often unbegun, diffused itself in unrecorded conversations. Gray liked to pretend that nothing much had ever happened to him, but such a judgment is both evasive and relative. A glance can be as seismic an event as an earthquake, and if his life was, by some people’s standards, tranquil, it was tranquillity recollected with emotion.