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Uncouth Rhymes: Thomas Gray, Prosody, and Literary History

Relying on Thomas Gray’s commonplace book, this article reconstructs the theoretical underpinnings of Gray’s unfinished History of English Poetry, a project to which the poet devoted nearly a decade of research, in order to shed light on Gray’s last published poems, a peculiar set of imitations of ancient Norse and Welsh verse originally composed as part of this historiographical project. In particular, it explores this History’s preoccupation with prosody as a stratum of literary historical evidence. It argues that Gray was inspired by Richard Grey’s Memoria Technica (1730), a contemporary art of memory, to conceive of prosodic phenomena not simply as stylistic markers of the literary past but as figures for the process and challenge of fashioning historical knowledge as such. It contends that Gray’s imitations of “uncouth” ancient verse forms continue this historiographical project at a poetic register, adumbrating a novel theory of literary form that accords poetic measure a constitutive role in the conception of literary history.