Foreseeing and Foreknowing: Dante’s ‘Ugolino’ and the Eton College Ode of Thomas Gray

Abstract

Gray discovered Dante in that sustained burst of scholarly enthusiasm with which he overran the dassics and then invaded Italy in a cultural and literary grand tour. He began learning Italian in 1737 while at Cambridge and refers in a letter of that year to his enthusiasm for Tasso, whom he apparently always preferred over Ariosto.¹ In 1739 he left for France and Italy in the company of Horace Walpole, who was to prove unfortunately a less than ideal travelling companion. Had Gray gone with the more congenial and academic Richard West it is likely that their conversation and common enthusiasm for Italian art and letters would have produced a more detailed record of his responsiveness to the work of Dante, but his relative lack of communication with Walpole meant that he was frustratingly silent on much that must have inspired him. The two men differed markedly in taste and temperament and spent much of the time in the later stages of their tour hardly speaking to each other. ²However, on their journey through the Alps, earlier in the tour, they experienced a common moment of anxiety, Gray’s account of which combines Dantesque terror with unavoidable farce: a wolf threatened the party but contented itself with carrying off Walpole’s ‘little fat black spaniel’: