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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-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. Implication, Readers' Resources, and Thomas Gray's Pindaric Odes 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of disclosing that ode's sense can be aided by new further reference to Paradise Lost, in the context of Gray's largely unpublished Commonplace Book, with its extensive, little-studied, and very pertinent use of Plato and Locke.
List of contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Poets' Secret
Part I. The Cognitive Reception of Gray's Pindarics
Chapter 1: The "Unintelligible Obscure"
Chapter 2: Legacies Including Samuel Johnson's
Chapter 3: The Subsequent Progress of Elucidation
Part II. Further Implications of "The Progress of Poesy"
Chapter 4: Logic, Linguistic Semantics, and Pragmatics
Chapter 5: "But Far Above the Great"
Chapter 6: "Beneath the Good How Far"
Epilogue: Locke, Plato, and Gray's Inferring
About the Author
Bibliography
Index
About the author
Frederick M. Keener is professor emeritus at Hofstra University. He has published widely in the field of eighteenth-century literature.
Summary
More radically than had any contemporary English author’s work, Thomas Gray’s two Pindaric odes of 1757, effectively challenged readers’ powers of comprehension, posing problems of reference as well as distinctly Pindaric problems of coherence. Solving those problems calls for knowledge not widely had then, now, or in between.
