SOURCE: "Thomas Gray and the Dedicatory Muse," in ELH, Vol. 54, No. 2, Summer, 1987, pp. 277-98.

In the following essay, Jackson provides a detailed examination of Gray's treatment of the themes of desire and authority in his poetry.

I will be occupied here with one abiding question: what kingdom of the imagination does Thomas Gray wish to build? I do not think I can quite explain why he is the most disappointing poet of the English eighteenth century—disappointing, that is, in terms of what was expected of him—but I do hope to explore the nature of a failed enterprise that of its kind is unrivaled within the century. I attribute this failure to no cultural malaise, for it seems to me utterly and completely personal, nor do I propose that had Gray been born in the year he died (1771) he would have become another sort of poet, flourishing...