n 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 in this verse. It is a poem of beauty and
sorrow that cannot be symbolized by such public figures as Cromwell and
Milton. Here the genius of the parting day, and all that it means