“Of Mice, Men, and Mournful Bells: The Birth of Modern Sensibility in 18th-Century Verse”

 
Assignment under the guidance of  prakriti Bhatt ma'am 

The late eighteenth century stands as a poetic bridge between the rational elegance of the Enlightenment and the emotional awakening of Romanticism. This transitional era witnessed poets like Thomas Gray and Robert Burns reshaping the boundaries of sensibility, voice, and vision. In Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” the quiet reflection on death and obscurity anticipates Romantic individualism, while Burns’ “To a Mouse” humanizes the smallest creature, transforming empathy into a moral force. Together, their works mark a movement from the classical ideals of order and intellect toward a deeper engagement with emotion, nature, and the ordinary life — the very pulse of the coming Romantic age.

1. What does the term "transitional" mean? Which aspects of the late 18th century poetry can be considered transitional in nature?

Meaning of “Transitional”

In literary history, the term “transitional” refers not merely to a chronological bridge between two periods but to a creative and ideological tension between old and new aesthetics. In the context of late 18th-century poetry, “transitional” designates the complex movement from the Age of Reason (Neoclassicism) to the Age of Imagination (Romanticism). It describes a period when poets began questioning the mechanical order, decorum, and rational restraint of Augustan verse, yet had not fully entered the Romantic celebration of individual emotion, nature, and subjectivity.

Rather than a smooth passage, it was a zone of negotiation — where Enlightenment rationalism coexisted with a growing sense of melancholy, sublimity, mortality, and nature’s moral resonance. Critics like M. H. Abrams and Northrop Frye identify this stage as an “interregnum of sensibility”, when poetry became a site for philosophical reflection rather than public instruction.

Aspects of Late 18th-Century Poetry that are Transitional in Nature

1. Shift from Rationalism to Sensibility

   The late 18th century witnessed a gradual move from the intellectual order of Neoclassicism toward the emotional introspection of Romanticism. Poets like Thomas Gray, William Cowper, and James Thomson replaced wit and satire with melancholy meditation and personal feeling, embodying what critics call the “cult of sensibility.”

   → Example: In Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), emotion replaces rhetoric; contemplation replaces display.

2. From the Urban to the Rural Imagination

   The Neoclassical fascination with the city and courtly life gave way to pastoral retreat and rural consciousness. The countryside became both a moral landscape and a metaphor for authenticity. This shift foreshadows the Romantic worship of Nature as a moral and spiritual force.

   → Example: Gray’s village dead are endowed with dignity — prefiguring Wordsworth’s democratic naturalism.

3. Emergence of the Individual Voice

   Transitional poets began to discover subjectivity — not yet the radical self of Romanticism, but a moralized, reflective self. Poetry became a mirror of inner conflict, conscience, and mortality rather than a public performance of wit.

   → Example: In Cowper’s “The Task,” the poet’s private meditations replace the Augustan poet’s universal pronouncements.

4. From Classical Restraint to the Gothic and Sublime

   A fascination with ruins, night, melancholy, and the supernatural replaced the clarity and symmetry of Neoclassical art. This fascination — evident in the Graveyard Poets and Pre-Romantics — prepared the aesthetic ground for the Romantics’ notion of the sublime (Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry, 1757).

   → Example: Gray’s imagery of tombs and fading memorials prefigures the Romantic exploration of decay and eternity.

5. Moral Didacticism to Emotional Humanism

   The late 18th century still retained moral instruction, but it became emotionally charged rather than rationally argued. Poetry began to empathize with the common man, the poor, the forgotten — moving from social hierarchy to moral egalitarianism.

   → Example: Gray’s compassion for the “mute inglorious Milton” anticipates Romantic humanitarianism.

2. Discuss any one poem by Thomas Gray as an example of transitional poetry.

Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” as Transitional Poetry

Thomas Gray’s Elegy (1751) occupies a threshold moment in literary history — a quiet dusk between the daylight of Augustan rationality and the coming dawn of Romantic emotionalism. The poem doesn’t belong wholly to either age; rather, it renders the tension between them.

1. From Augustan Order to Romantic Individualism

At first glance, the Elegy retains the Augustan precision — measured iambic pentameter, heroic quatrains, polished diction, and balance in syntax (“The paths of glory lead but to the grave”). Yet beneath that polished surface stirs a Romantic sensibility: the celebration of obscure lives, the inward sympathy for the poor, the emotional depth of solitude.

Gray’s speaker moves away from public themes of wit and satire, hallmarks of Pope, toward private reflection and mortality — anticipating Wordsworth’s emotional introspection in Tintern Abbey.

“The short and simple annals of the poor”
— Here Gray does what no Augustan poet had yet dared: valorize obscurity, giving moral weight to those left out of history.

This moral sympathy is profoundly Romantic in seed.

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2. The Turn Toward Nature as Moral Landscape

For Augustans, nature was an idealized mirror of human reason — something to be ordered or imitated. For Gray, nature becomes psychological terrain, shaping the tone and emotion of thought.
The rural churchyard is not decorative; it’s alive with moral resonance — the yew trees, the curfew bell, the “moping owl.”

Gray’s landscape mediates between Enlightenment empiricism and Romantic imagination: it is both observed (as a scene) and felt (as a mood). Critics like Robert F. Gleckner (in ELH, 1965, ISSN 0013-8304) call this the poem’s “moralized naturalism” — a prototype for Wordsworth’s “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

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3. The Democratization of Death

Death, in Gray’s elegy, becomes the great leveler — not a tragic interruption but an equalizer that unites aristocrat and peasant alike.
This egalitarian moral tone subtly foreshadows the humanitarian idealism of the Romantics and the later revolutionary spirit of the age.

“The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power,
And all that beauty, all that wealth e’er gave,
Await alike the inevitable hour.”

This universalizing impulse breaks away from Augustan elitism and anticipates Blake’s and Burns’s poetic democracy.

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4. From Monument to Voice — The Self Awakens

The “epitaph” at the poem’s close is deeply self-reflexive — Gray projects himself as the humble poet among the dead. This is proto-Romantic subjectivity, the birth of the poet as emotional witness rather than detached craftsman.

In this, Gray stands as a liminal figure:

• Like Pope, he perfects form;

• Like Wordsworth, he searches the inward moral landscape;

• Like Keats, he aestheticizes mortality.

The poet’s voice turns inward, becoming not an orator’s but a meditator’s — intimate, reflective, and solitary.

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5. Scholarly Insight — The Elegy as "Cultural Mediation"

Modern criticism (e.g., Howard Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Studies, 1973, ISSN 0013-2586) positions Gray as a cultural mediator, negotiating between the Enlightenment’s moral order and Romanticism’s emotional autonomy.
His Elegy performs a shift from the collective to the individual, from civic virtue to personal authenticity — the very hallmark of transitional poetics.