The Neoclassical age, a time of immense structure and strict rules, preceded a Romantic generation that was full of luxuriant freedoms in both thought and style.  However, the world did not just jump from one to the other.  A smooth transition allowed this pivotal change to occur.  Thomas Gray provided a bridge between the Neoclassical style of his time and the Romantic era of John Keats.

First off, one cannot strictly classify Thomas Gray as a Neoclassical writer nor as a Romantic author.  He possessed qualities of both epochs and thus lied somewhere in the middle.  One of Gray’s Neoclassical traits was his traditionalism.  In addition to working with many of the same subjects that his peers were writing on, Gray implemented traditional techniques like the use of elevated poetic language and classical forms.  He also employed the personification of concepts, such as in his “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard:”
          A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown
     Fair Science frowned not on his humble birth,
          And Melancholy marked him for her own.  (lines 118-120)
By using this poetic tool, Gray allowed his readers to visualize what he wrote in a familiar way.

Similar to his traditionalism, Gray also maintained the Neoclassical characteristic of constraint.  In the “Elegy,” his best known poem, he adhered to an established stanza pattern and rhyming system.  Each stanza contained four lines with an abab rhyme:
One morn I missed him on the customed hill,
         Along the hearth, and near his favorite tree;
    Another came; nor yet beside the rill,
         Nor up the lawn, nor at the wood was he.  (109-112)
In addition, his verses contained complicated metrical schemes (“Thomas Gray” 1517).  The lack of spontaneity within his poems enabled Gray to conform to the expectations of his time.

Along with his defined structure, Gray also wrote using formal diction.  Many writers of the Neoclassical period composed poems using formal diction as a way to show off their wit and cleverness.  In contrast, Gray’s diction was the result of his perfectionism.  He composed all of his poems with meticulous attention, constructing and reconstructing line after line until he thought each was flawless.  The result was a blend of formal and semi-formal diction: “The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, / The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea” (1-2).  Although Gray’s reasons for such a voice were different from his Neoclassical contemporaries, the end products were, nevertheless, all the same.

Another Neoclassical trait of Gray’s “Elegy” was its solid and logical thought processes.  Gray realized that nature had many undiscovered wonders and riches:
     Full many a gem of purest ray serene,
          The dark unfathomed caves of ocean bear:
     Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,
          And waste its sweetness on the desert air.  (53-56)
Knowing that mankind is also a part of nature, Gray took this reasoning one step further.  He proposed that there were many people throughout the lands that held the potential of being a famous or powerful individual.  However, the majority of these people failed to be discovered because they lived simple country lives:
     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.  (57-60)
This type of rationale, typical of the Neoclassical era, contributed to this period's reputation as the Age of Reason.

Despite Gray’s Neoclassical properties, he also possessed many Romantic traits.  His work contained so many new ideas that his writings astonished his contemporaries.  To them, it was so foreign and dissimilar to the poetry in fashion (Arnold 1522).  Gray’s strongest Romantic quality was his focus on the “common” man.  He often drew on everyday occurrences to bring life to his poetry: “No children run to lisp their sire’s return, / Or climb his knees the envied kiss to share” (23-24).  In addition, the concise and unforgettable concluding stanzas of his “Elegy” transformed the work into the joy of the ordinary reader (Jackson 1530).

Similarly, Gray realized that the typical person was somewhat of a poor farmer, so he concentrated on rural life and the awe of nature.  His poems carried evocative descriptions of the outdoors: “Now fades the glimmering landscape on the sight, / And all the air a solemn stillness holds” (5-6).  Gray used his sympathy to the splendors of the countryside to breathe zest into his verses (“The Beginnings of the Romantic Revolt” 325).

Furthermore, Gray added more emotion to his work than his peers.  His “Elegy” was instinctive and emotional and it sparked intangible feelings (“Thomas Gray” 1518).  In his meditations on the certainty of demise, he spoke with a tone of mournfulness that was missing from the neoclassical compositions on the same theme:
     No farther seek his merits to disclose,
          Or draw his frailties from their dread abode
     (There they alike in trembling hope repose),
          The bosom of his Father and his God.  (125-129)
However, the same melancholy tone that Gray produced in the eighteenth century later became extremely popular during the nineteenth century (“The Beginnings of the Romantic Revolt” 325).

Eventually, Thomas Gray’s works gave way to Romanticism, the new form of writing that dominated the next era.  John Keats, like other renowned Romantic writers, imitated Gray’s emphasis on the average person, use of rural settings, emotional outlook on life, and his overall love for nature.  In Keats’s “To Autumn,” an elegant and spirited portrayal of the environment, he reflected the Romantic tendency of correlating the natural, rustic world to personal interests:
                             . . . flowers for the bees,
     Until they think warm days will never cease,
          For Summer has o’er-brimmed their clammy cells.  (9-11)
Keats’s description of the fruit, flowers and the bees in this poem created a fresh and lively vision of autumn while allowing the reader to view life at a different angle (Unger 1960).

Furthermore, Keats’s poems contained the same imagination and emotion as did Gray’s. Keats dreamed up an entire countryside in “To Autumn,” and then manifested this wonderful landscape through the eyes of innocence.  In the first stanza Keats portrayed his ideal farmland where everything turns out right:
     And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
          To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
     With a sweet kernel.  (6-8)
Then, in the third stanza, he vividly pictured the perfect ending to a day in this fantasy land:
          Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
     The redbreast whistles from a garden croft,
          And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.  (31-33)
Keats’s power to transform the complex images of his mind into comprehensible expressions allowed the reader to join him in his quixotic world.

In addition, Keats’s poetry usually centralized around the individual.  Because of his bout with tuberculosis and the inevitability of death, Keats often wrote about the fears and the passions of the singleton.  His poem “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be” revealed Keats’s personal feelings on his foreboding death: “. . . I have fears that I may cease to be / Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain” (1-2). “Ode to a Nightingale,” another example, also presented the private anguishes of the speaker:
     My  heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
          My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
     Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
          One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.  (1-4)
The wonder of Keats’s poetry rested in his extreme impressionability of his heart, and in his ability to elaborate and define these feelings in ordinary terms (de Reyes 1957).

Moreover, Keats and his literary companions added other characteristics that went against the Neoclassical norm such as spontaneity, experiment, intimacy, and the desire for the mysterious and supernatural.  In delving out his emotions, Keats communicated on a more personal level with his reader.  He displayed his subjectivity when he wrote, “Where are the songs of Spring?  Ay, where are they?” (23).  Keats spoke in a conversational tone not to divulge knowledge, but to endeavor at effect.

However, Keats was not entirely Romantic in style.  Some aspects of his other works reflected Neoclassical traits similar to those of Thomas Gray. Keats often conformed to pre-established formats.  Such was the case in his poems “Ode on a Grecian Urn” and “Ode to a Nightingale” which he wrote in the style of a Horatian ode.  Keats also spoke in a more cultivated language, similar to his predecessors, in “Ode to a Nightingale”:
     Tasting of Flora and the country green,
          Dance, and Provençal song, and sunburned mirth!
     O for a beaker full of the warm South,
          Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene.  (13-16)
Evidently, Keats looked back on his forerunners for guidance and therefore he sometimes followed their lead.

Ultimately, John Keats and his Romantic contemporaries were the by-products of the revolutionary work of Thomas Gray.  Even though Gray adhered to some Neoclassical traits such as traditionalism, constraint, formal diction, and the use of logic, he also started the trend towards Romanticism.  Gray’s work contained emotional views, emphasis on the ordinary person, and a love for the rural setting.  Keats not only echoed these qualities, but also added a more individualistic and private manner to his work.  All in all, both Keats and Gray succeeded in sparking fires inside the hearts and souls of their times.
 
 

Arnold, Matthew.  “Thomas Gray.” World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present.  6 vols.  Ed. James P. Draper.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  3:1522-1523.

Gray, Thomas.  “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.”  English and Western Literature.  Eds. George Kearns et al.  New York: Macmillan, 1987.  303-307.

Jackson, Wallace.  “Thomas Gray: Drowning in Human Voices.” World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present.  6 vols.  Ed. James P. Draper.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  3:1530-1534.

Keats, John.  “Ode to a Nightingale.” English and Western Literature.  Eds. George Kearns et al.  New York: Macmillan, 1987.  383-385.

---.  “To Autumn.” English and Western Literature.  Eds. George Kearns et al.  New York: Macmillan, 1987.  389-390.

---.  “When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be.” English and Western Literature.  Eds. George Kearns et al.  New York: Macmillan, 1987.  382.

Reyes, Mary de.  “John Keats.”  World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present.  6 vols.  Ed. James P. Draper.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  3:1955-1957.

“Thomas Gray.”  England in Literature. Eds. Robert C. Pooley, et al.  Chicago: Scott, Foresman and Company, 1963.  325

"Thomas Gray."  World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present. 6 vols. Ed. James P. Draper.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  3:1517-1519.

Unger, Leonard.  “Keats and the Music of Autumn.” World Literature Criticism: 1500 to the Present.  6 vols.  Ed. James P. Draper.  Detroit: Gale Research, 1992.  3:1960-1963.