the Elegy as far back as 1746—­Mason says it was begun in August, 1742—­and did not finish it until June 12, 1750.  Probably there is no other short poem in English literature which was brooded over for so many seasons.  Nor was there ever a greater justification for patient brooding.  Gray in this poem liberated the English imagination after half a century of prose and rhetoric.  He restored poetry to its true function as the confession of an individual soul.  Wordsworth has blamed Gray for introducing, or at least, assisting to introduce, the curse of poetic diction into English literature.  But poetic diction was in use long before Gray.  He is remarkable among English poets, not for having succumbed to poetic diction, but for having triumphed over it.  It is poetic feeling, not poetic diction, that distinguishes him from the mass of eighteenth-century writers.  It is an interesting coincidence that Gray and Collins should have brought about a poetic revival by the rediscovery of the beauty of evening, just as Mr. Yeats and “A.E.” brought about a poetic revival in our own day by the rediscovery of the beauty of twilight.  Both schools of poetry (if it is permissible to call them schools) found in the stillness of the evening a natural refuge for the individual soul from the tyrannical prose of common day.  There have been critics, including Matthew Arnold, who have denied that the Elegy is the greatest of Gray’s poems.  This, I think, can only be because they have been unable to see the poetry for the quotations.  No other poem that Gray ever wrote was a miracle. The Bard is a masterpiece of imaginative rhetoric.  But the Elegy is more than this.  It is an autobiography and the creation of a world for the hearts of men.  Here Gray delivers the secret doctrine of the poets.  Here he escapes out of the eighteenth century into immortality.  One realizes what an effort it must have been to rise above his century when one reads an earlier version of some of his most famous lines: 

  Some village Cato (——­) with dauntless breast
    The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
  Some mute, inglorious Tully here may rest;
    Some Caesar guiltless of his country’s blood.

Could there be a more effective example of the return to reality than we find in the final shape of this verse?

  Some village Hampden, that with dauntless breast
    The little tyrant of his fields withstood;
  Some mute, inglorious Milton here may rest,
    Some Cromwell guiltless of his country’s blood.

It is as though suddenly it had been revealed to Gray that poetry is not a mere literary exercise but the image of reality; that it does not consist in vain admiration of models far off in time and place, but that it is as near to one as one’s breath and one’s country.  Not that the Elegy would have been one of the great poems of the world if it had never plunged deeper into the heart than