Editing Thomas Gray (section)

==Forms==
[[File:The hours zoom in 4.jpg|thumb|''[[The Hours (picture)|The Hours]]'' by [[Maria Cosway]], an illustration to Gray's poem ''Ode on the Spring'', referring to the lines "Lo! where the rosy-bosomed Hours, Fair Venus' train, appear"]]
Gray considered his two [[Pindar|Pindaric odes]], ''The Progress of Poesy'' and ''[[The Bard (poem)|The Bard]]'', as his best works. Pindaric odes are to be written with fire and passion, unlike the calmer and more reflective Horatian odes such as ''Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College''. ''The Bard'' tells of a wild Welsh poet cursing the Norman king [[Edward I of England|Edward I]] after his conquest of Wales and prophesying in detail the downfall of the [[House of Plantagenet]]. It is melodramatic, and ends with the bard hurling himself to his death from the top of a mountain.

When his duties allowed, Gray travelled widely throughout Britain to places such as Yorkshire, Derbyshire, Scotland and most notably the Lake District (see his ''Journal of a Visit to the Lake District'' in 1769) in search of [[picturesque]] landscapes and ancient monuments. These elements were not generally valued in the early 18th century, when the popular taste ran to [[classicism|classical]] styles in architecture and literature, and most people liked their scenery tame and well-tended. The [[Gothic fiction|Gothic]] details that appear in his ''Elegy'' and ''The Bard'' are a part of the first foreshadowing of the [[Romantic movement]] that dominated the early 19th century, when [[Wordsworth|William Wordsworth]] and the other [[Lake poets]] taught people to value the picturesque, the sublime, and the Gothic.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Kalter|first=Barrett|year=2003|title=DIY Gothic: Thomas Gray and the Medieval Revival|journal=ELH|volume=70|issue=4|pages=989–1019|issn=0013-8304|jstor=30029910|doi=10.1353/elh.2004.0006|s2cid=143552252}}</ref> Gray combined traditional forms and poetic diction with new topics and modes of expression, and may be considered as a classically focused precursor of the [[Romanticism|romantic]] revival.{{citation needed|date=November 2012}}

Gray's connection to the [[Romantic poets]] is vexed. In the prefaces to the 1800 and 1802 editions of Wordsworth's and [[Samuel Taylor Coleridge]]'s ''[[Lyrical Ballads]]'', Wordsworth singled out Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" to exemplify what he found most objectionable in poetry, declaring it was
<blockquote>"Gray, who was at the head of those who, by their reasonings, have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt prose and metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction."<ref name="Abrams">{{cite book |author-link=M.H. Abrams |last=Abrams |first=M. H. |title=The Norton Anthology of English Literature |volume=2 |edition=Fourth |publisher=[[W. W. Norton & Company]] |location=New York |year=1979 |page=167 |isbn=0-393-95039-5 |display-authors=etal|title-link=Norton Anthology of English Literature }}</ref></blockquote> Gray wrote in a letter to West, that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry."<ref name="Abrams" />