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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.
Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, and classical scholar at Cambridge University, being a fellow first of Peterhouse then of Pembroke College. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard , published in 1751.
At its narrowest, the term "Graveyard School" refers to four poems: Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", Thomas Parnell's "Night-Piece on Death", Robert Blair's The Grave and Edward Young's Night-Thoughts. At its broadest, it can describe a host of poetry and prose works popular in the early and mid-eighteenth century.
Some say the best known elegy in English is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray, a well-known English poet. This elegy discusses the actual condition of death, not just the death of a single individual. John Milton’s "Lycidas," considered the most famous pastoral elegy, mourns the death of the poet’s good friend Edward King.
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]
An extract from another major influence, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", is used as an epigraph. The poem is dedicated to Robert Aiken, a successful Ayrshire lawyer who was Burns's patron at the time, and the opening stanza addresses him in advancing the poem's sentimental theme. [2]
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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.