Gray's Sonnet on the Death of Richard West has never recovered from the judgment visited upon it by Wordsworth, for whom it neatly demonstrated how Gray “was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction.” Scholars in recent times have been harsh: “Characteristically Gray wrote in English a stilted sonnet on West's death and put his genuine feelings into the Latin verses that he appended to his philosophical fragment, De principiis cogitandi. Not enough of a romantic to wear his heart on his sleeve, he concealed his emotions in classical Latin.” The following essay may show to what degree, if any, the work is “stilted” and the emotions are “concealed”; more directly, however, it is intended to show what kind of poem Gray was writing, and to consider whether he sought again to accomplish the sonnet's intentions in the Elegy.