Implication, readers' resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric odes / Frederick M. Keener.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Keener, Frederick M., 1937-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771--Criticism and interpretation.

Gray, Thomas.

Gray, Thomas, 1716-1771.

English poetry--18th century--History and criticism.

English poetry.

Criticism and interpretation.

Physical Description:

vii, 243 pages ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Newark : University of Delaware Press ; Lanham, Md. : Rowman & Littlefield, [2012]

Summary:

Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes presents an account of the "Poets' Secret," the quite belated, historically recent discovery by scholars and critics of something many poets have recognized and employed for ages: the sense expressed by allusively parallel parts within a text-sense thus expressed intratextually rather than only intertextually.

Inferential perception of the implicit sense produced logically and linguistically-by enthymemes, implicatures, and other intratextual features, as well as intertextual ones-can be indispensable for readers' comprehension of literary as well as other texts, especially their difficult passages. This book addresses these elusive matters as they have historically been posed by Thomas Gray's Pindaric odes of 1757, and mainly the first of them, "The Progress of Poesy," a poem that readers have more or less knowledgeably struggled to understand from the outset. The process of disclosing that ode's sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray's largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke. Book jacket.

Contents:

Introduction: The poets' secret

The unintelligible obscure

Legacies including Samuel Johnson's

The subsequent progress of elucidation

Logic, linguistic semantics, and pragmatics

But far above the great

Beneath the good how far

Epilogue: Locke, Plato, and Gray's inferring.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9781611494143

1611494141

9781611494150

161149415X

OCLC:

794363250