It is said that, the night before the capture of Quebec from the French in 1759, General Wolfe read Gray's Elegy aloud to his officers as they crossed the St Lawrence River. 'I would rather have been the author of that piece than beat the French tomorrow,' he is supposed to have said. Presumably his men didn't suddenly start to worry that they were being led into combat by some absurd literary connoisseur. Perhaps they, too, were gentlemen soldiers and equally admiring of Gray's meditative, sonorous poem. Some have since doubted the details of the story, but we know that Wolfe did carry to war a copy of the Elegy, given him by the woman to whom he was engaged. For the sensitive yet stoical warrior, Gray's work was the most admirable of all modern poems and a proper source of consolation on the eve of battle.

LRB 13 December 2001 | PDF Download