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Gray and Johnson: parallel sentiments in the "Eton College Ode" and Rasselas.(Essays)(Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson)(Critical essay)

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From: ANQ
Date: 20070322
Author:Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning

Johnson's damnation-by-faint-praise of all Gray's poems save the "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" has prompted at least one of his admirers to an equally ungenerous assessment of a great poet. This, for example, is how Paul Fussell responds to the resolutory epigram in the "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College":

 
   The end of the poem thus asserts the sentimentalist position which 
   the stanza of the ambush has unsuccessfully attempted to disguise. 
   The difficulty of imagining Johnson's uttering anything like Gray's 
   last line measures Gray's distance from ...

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