Front cover image for Gray agonistes : Thomas Gray and masculine friendship

Gray agonistes : Thomas Gray and masculine friendship

Gray Agonistes is the first book to examine in detail the intersection in Thomas Gray's life and poetry of Milton's career and achievement and Gray's intense sexual relationship with Richard West (and, to a lesser extent, with Horace Walpole and Thomas Ashton, all of whom banded together at Eton as the Quadruple Alliance). In all of Gray's poetry, Robert F. Gleckner discovers sites of intense and heroic struggle, both with Milton's ghost and with Gray's need to articulate his passionate attachment to West. After West's early death in 1742, Gray's foreboding became anguish and he became the poet of Elegy in a Country Courtyard
Print Book, English, 1997
Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore, Md., 1997
Biographies
x, 231 pages ; 24 cm
9780801854330, 0801854334
34546308
The Miltonic background
Gray, West, and epistolary encoding
Gray, West, Walpole, and the letters
The poems (I)
The poems (II) and the death of West
The poems (III)
The poems (IV): from cat to progress