The Poet Without a Name: Gray's Elegy and the Problem of History - Hardcover

Henry Weinfield offers a new reading not only of the Elegy itself but also of its place in English literary history. His central argument is that in Gray’sElegy the thematic constellation of poverty, anonymity, alienation, and unfulfilled potentialor what Weinfield calls the "problem of history"is fully articulated for the first time, and that, as a result, theElegy represents an important turning-point in the history of English poetry.