The Epistolary Melancholy of Thomas Gray

Written from the standpoint of "a life spent out of the World," Gray's letters reveal a persistent strain of melancholy which can be interpreted as a symptomatic response to the eighteenth-century problem of the "golden mean." This essay argues that if Gray did experience the culture of his time as being fragmented and self-negating, a view which the correspondence persuades us to adopt, then his melancholy is implicitly a criticism of his age.