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Holograph manuscript of Gray's "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard". The poem most likely originated in the poetry that Gray composed in 1742. William Mason, in Memoirs, discussed his friend Gray and the origins of Elegy: "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy in a Country Church-yard was begun, if not concluded, at this time [August 1742] also: Though I am aware that as it stands at ...
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]
The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse ...
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.
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
Gray's Elegy (1750) [74] Thomas Gray was a regular visitor to Stoke Poges, which was home to his mother and an aunt, [ 75 ] and the churchyard at St Giles is reputed to have been the inspiration for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard , though this is not universally accepted. [ 76 ]
These works appeared in Pope's lifetime and were popular, but the older, more conservative poetry maintained its hold for a while to come. On the other hand, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard set off a new craze for poetry of melancholy reflection. Gray's Elegy appeared in 1750, and it immediately set new ground. First, it was ...
The first was Richard Owen Cambridge's clever "Elegy Written in an Empty Assembly-Room" (1756). [33] Although its preface describes the poem as "being a Parody on the most remarkable Passages in the well-known Epistle of Eloisa to Abelard ", its title also places it among the contemporary parodies of Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard ...