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Since the Victorians, the thinness of Gray’s output has encouraged critics of various persuasions to view him as an inhibited, ultimately abortive poet whose temperament was not up to the challenges and pressures he had to face (Miltonic influence, the commercialisation of culture, the suppression of homosexual desire, etc.). Yet his few published poems did enjoy tremendous fame, at least during the last third of the eighteenth century, and he never was entirely forgotten. The present article attempts to make sense of Gray’s paradoxical status in literary history, by focusing on three salient aspects of his work: first, a certain kind of belated Augustan or Neoclassical desire for perfection, which he carried to intransigent extremes, and which may partly explain the sense of novelty many of his poems elicited; secondly, a close engagement with the new empiricist epistemology, which resulted in his foregrounding the intensities and ambiguities of sensation; thirdly, a lurking, elusive political radicalism, which to an extent stemmed from his peculiar lyrical procedures, and contributed powerfully to his aura in the 1780s and 1790s.