SOURCE: "Gray's Elegy and the Dissolution of the Pastoral," in The Poet without a Name: Gray's "Elegy" and the Problem of History, Southern Illinois University Press, 1991, pp. 150-63.

In the following essay on the "Elegy," Weinfeld defines Gray's place within the history of the pastoral genre.

Like all poems that are central to their time, and hence to the historical matrix, the "Elegy" is embedded in a tradition (or series of traditions) that it simultaneously subverts. In chapter 3 we saw this to be the case with respect to the heroic, elegiac, and pastoral traditions (although these overlapping categories should not be construed as being more than heuristic devices for the organization of diverse historical particulars). In the case of the pastoral, however, because of its intimate connection to the "problem of history," we are confronted with a series of issues that require fuller theoretical elaboration than could be...