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First page of Dodsley's illustrated edition of Gray's Elegy with illustration by Richard Bentley. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. [1] The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742.
He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. [1] Gray was a self-critical writer who published only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular. He was even offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1757 after the death of Colley Cibber, though he declined. [2]
In 1751, Thomas Gray published "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", composed in the heroic stanza.Written in iambic pentameter, the poem followed the same metrical and structural patterns seen in Annus Mirabilis, but the use of the poetic form in an elegy gave it the title of the "elegiac decasyllabic quatrain". [3]
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The "Graveyard Poets", also termed "Churchyard Poets", [1] were a number of pre-Romantic poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms" [2] elicited by the presence of the graveyard. Moving beyond the elegy lamenting a single death, their purpose was rarely sensationalist.
However, in 1751, Thomas Gray wrote "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". That poem inspired numerous imitators, and soon both the revived Pindaric ode and "elegy" were commonplace. Gray used the term elegy for a poem of solitude and mourning, and not just for funereal verse. He also freed the elegy from the classical elegiac meter.
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard by Thomas Gray ... New York Thomas Y. Crowell & Co. Publishers The Drugstore Cat by Ann Petry and illustrated by Susanne Suba (1949)
Print/export Download as PDF; Printable version; ... He translated into Urdu Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". [1] References