The Archaeology of Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry”

     One thinks casually of eighteenth-century Augustan literature as highly formal and conventional, its values derived from that age of Roman antiquity which was already belatedly looking backward toward the Greek. The learned classical references that ornament the poetry of the period may seem to be decorative only, signs of allegiance to the lofty standards of the ancient masters, a sort of pretty upper-class language that operated almost like slang, to indicate in shorthand fashion a background and values shared by many European intellectuals. Though Gray’s “The Progress of Poetry” contains numerous references that could be described in this way, there is a deeper, more archaic layer of mythology in his account. Embodying many traits of the nascent Romantic movement and familiar (as very few in earlier eras had been) with the oral poetries of traditional societies, Gray uses mythology in a passionate, intuitive, and personal way at the same time that he observes the usage accepted, even required, from poets in his day. While the conventional allusions support the straightforward burden of the poem as an account of poetry’s history from Classical times through the Middle Ages up to his own day, indeed to himself, this deeper personal level of mythology suggests an altogether different theme.
     Gray was an excellent Classical scholar, spending much of his life as a fellow at Cambridge. His familiarity with both Greek and Latin literature was far beyond that required to make the gestures toward antiquity that were de rigeur in his day. Such references as those in the opening stanza of “The Progress of Poetry” to the Aeolian lyre and to Helicon are as graceful and informative, if as lacking in originality, as the many similar allusions in other authors. The first of these images has a specific meaning significant in Coleridge’s “The Eolian Harp,” but here it is largely conventional, signifying little more than poetry in general. Using such terms at the outset of a poem establishes the writer’s bona fides as a scholar qualified to compose poetry.
     Yet Gray is clearly, with Thomson, Collins, and Cowper, a precursor of Romanticism. The very fact of his imitating Pindar, rather than, like Samuel Johnson, Horace, is evidence for the revaluation taking place. Pindar’s poems are more open in form and associative in logic, spraying mythological names with abandon and daring the reader to keep up. His awareness, imperfect as it may have been, of the pre-Christian oral poetry Celtic, Norwegian, and Welsh, as well as from Lapland and America distinguishes him from earlier critics who would have felt such “primitive” poetry to be necessarily inferior. Further, his sympathetic ear equates with poetry the sounds of awakening nature, the “thousand rills,” the “laughing flowers,” the whole “rich stream of music,” he can hear “rebellow to the roar.” Thus the whole generative engine of nature is incorporated into his own verses.
     Somewhat optimistically Gray notes the power of art to make life livable, banishing “sullen Cares.” In a clear expression of the Romantic politics of radical dissent, he claims that poetry is associated with “Freedom’s holy flame,” ignoring the centuries-long association of art with the ruling class.
     In spite of such sympathetic approaches to Romantic ideals, Gray was criticized by Wordsworth in the seminal statement of Romantic poetic theory, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, for his inauthentic “curiously elaborate” language distant from that of ordinary prose in his “Sonnet” on the death of Richard West, surely one of Gray’s most strongly-felt compositions. While there is little doubt that Gray’s emotion was genuine and profound, the poem’s use of Apollo is as wholly conventional.
     The same vaguely unfocused generative powers of nature that fail to console the grieving poet underlie his excited joy at the beginning of “The Progress of Poetry,” where the transference of energy in the poem is originally felt in the flow of poetry itself, which is likened to the fructifying streams. In later stanzas the same redemptive force is attributed to Aphrodite by (stanza I.3), then to the Muse (II, 2), and finally to the figure of Fancy (III, 3). The successive appearance of these representations of the divine female support the concluding image of the poet as Pindar in the form of a “Theban Eagle,” soaring to the empyrean.
     Classed as one of the “graveyard poets,” Gray’s outlook was indeed melancholy. Apart from the loss of innocence of which he complains in his Eton College ode, “The Progress of Poetry” contains a catalogue of causes of suffering “Labour, and Penury, the racks of Pain” culminating in “Death” and conquerable only by the Muse which is able to banish “Night, and all her sickly dews.”
     Gray used the conventional images of Classical learning, invoking the goddess as an ally against these universal threats to mankind, but in his mind the goddess also assumed a very individual meaning. His muse was a lover but also a maternal figure protecting him from meanness and vice. Though she is associated with nature’s reverdie, she also protects against the uncontrolled passions. In his "Hymn to Ignorance" he appeals to the goddess of not-knowing, feeling he would be far happier with less insight and regretting that he “forsook” her “fond embrace.”
     In his “Ode to Spring” Venus’ powers are inadequate to do more than provide a temporary respite from cares; in the end the poet feels himself to be “a solitary fly.” Most pointedly, in the “Ode to Adversity” he praises adversity, particularized as “Despair, and fell Disease, and ghastly Poverty,” as a “rigid nurse” who teaches “Virtue” and cultivates philosophy by teaching the poet “to love and to forgive.” Though “wit” had been the byword of Pope’s generation, according to the “Hymn to Ignorance” he feels “filial reverence” for the protective value of lack of knowledge, looking with nostalgia on earlier eras when the whole world was ruled by ignorance, undeceived by “Wit’s delusive ray” which may tempt people into transgression. In “The Progress of Poetry,” art is a firewall against “frantic Passions.” For Gray the divine female, though associated with fertility and love, is paradoxically an aid in self-control. While he is attracted to the Romantic values of imagination and emotion, he is cautious and seeks to moderate these potentially explosive forces. In Gray’s greatest poems, this mythology is highly ambivalent.
     At the end of “The Progress of Poetry” the persona takes flight like an eagle, an image familiar from Pindar, imitated by Bacchylides and Horace, and thus wholly acceptable as a routine ornament. The image of the high-flying poet is, of course, far more archaic than those writers. The notion of a poet/seer flying into the air to attain wisdom is one of the most common shamanistic tropes. Gray may have been wholly unaware of these archaic usages, but he reenacts them for the eighteenth century in his odes.
     Thus he sprinkles Classical allusion over the surface of his verse like a baker adding roses of icing to a cake, but, at the same time, at a subterranean level, he expresses his moral and existential anxieties and his hope for the liberation of poetic flight into the sublime. As psychological facts these tensions imply his own mental distress and internal division, while intellectually, they suggest the conflicts associated with his writing just on the brink of Romanticism. Perhaps such ambivalence is a factor in his extraordinarily small oeuvre which amounted during his lifetime to only thirteen poems, less than a thousand lines in total. If so, the poems he did write may be all the more dense and significant, precise and beautiful, for the ambiguity they suggest, more worthy perhaps than a few thousand lines of a lesser writer’s wholly conventional verse. Though Gray turned down the position of Poet Laureate, he had in his own day and has today far more readers than Colley Cibber who held the honor for decades or William Whitehead who succeeded him.