Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes

Frederick M. Keener is professor emeritus at Hofstra University. He has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature.

• Acknowledgments Introduction: The Poets’ SecretPart I. The Cognitive Reception of Gray’s PindaricsChapter 1: The “Unintelligible Obscure” Chapter 2: Legacies Including Samuel Johnson’s Chapter 3: The Subsequent Progress of Elucidation Part II. Further Implications of “The Progress of Poesy” Chapter 4: Logic, Linguistic Semantics, and Pragmatics Chapter 5: “But Far Above the Great” Chapter 6: “Beneath the Good How Far” Epilogue: Locke, Plato, and Gray’s Inferring About the AuthorBibliographyIndex

Interest in poststructuralist exotica has subsided since the theory boom of the 1960s and 1970s. However, one theoretical method, intertextuality studies, has recently enjoyed a modest resurgence. In this area, Keener (Hofstra Univ.) makes a valuable contribution. Given its dense, self-consciously allusive saturation, Gray's poetry lends itself to this focus. Keener dilates primarily on The Progress of Poesy, but offers much more. He urges adoption of "intratextuality," a term "covering a variety of more specific parallels within an individual text," encompassing "instances when a part of a given text recalls one or more parts ... to express sense in that text." Additionally, he contextualizes his discussion in terms of Gray's critical reception, including views of Gray's immediate contemporaries (Samuel Johnson, Hazlitt, Coleridge) and of modern commentators. And he seeks to bag even bigger game, querying the epistemology underpinning cognitive comprehension and inferential apprehension of English poetry from Shakespeare and Milton to T. S. Eliot. With its amplitude and reach, Keener's study joins such indispensable volumes as The Poems of Thomas Gray, William Collins, Oliver Goldsmith, ed. by Roger Lonsdale (1969); Robert L. Mack's eponymous biography (CH, Mar'01, 38-3766); and James Garrison's A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray's "Elegy" (CH, Dec'09, 47-1859). Summing Up: Highly recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.