SOURCE: "Classical or Romantic?," in >Thomas Gray, Grosset & Dunlap, 1964, pp. 127-46.

In the following essay, which forms the concluding chapter of Golden's full-length study of Gray, Golden briefly outlines some of the characteristics of Neoclassical and Romantic literature and then discusses Gray's poetry and his place in English literary history in relation to both traditions.

This study has been primarily concerned with Gray and with the nature and quality of his poems rather than with his and their place in English literature. Among many other things, poetry is a response to intellectual, particularly to literary, climates in effect at a given time and place. Furthermore, if it is significant poetry, as T. S. Eliot has pointed out, it changes the way one looks at what preceded it—as an outgrowth of tendencies one might not have been aware of—and it evidently affects what follows by becoming a...