In the next three months Gray wrote “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College,” “Hymn to Adversity,” and “Sonnet on the Death of Mr. In 1742 Grey wrote his first major poem, “Ode on the Spring,” which he sent to his close friend Richard West-unknowingly on the very day of West’s death from tuberculosis. Gray then moved with his mother to Stoke Poges, Buckinhamshire, and began his most productive period of poetic composition. He returned to London later in the year, shortly before his father died. The two separated in Italy in 1741 after a quarrel, and Gray continued the journey on his own. However, he and childhood friend Horace Walpole embarked on an extended tour of Europe. He left Cambridge in 1738 without taking a degree, intending to study law in London. Gray attended Eton School from 1725 until 1734, when he entered Cambridge University. Gray’s father was a mentally disturbed and violent man who at times abused his wife. Author Biographyīorn in the Cornhill district of London in 1716, Gray was the son of Dorothy Antrobus Gray, a milliner, and Philip Gray, a scrivener.
On the other hand, it tends toward the emotionalism and individualism of the Romantic poets most importantly, it idealizes and elevates the common man. On the one hand, it has the ordered, balanced phrasing and rational sentiments of Neoclassical poetry. The poem was written at the end of the Augustan Age and at the beginning of the Romantic period, and the poem has characteristics associated with both literary periods. Gray did not produce a great deal of poetry the “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” however, has earned him a respected and deserved place in literary history. This thought leads him to praise the dead for the honest, simple lives that they lived. He goes on to wonder if among the lowly people buried in the churchyard there had been any natural poets or politicians whose talent had simply never been discovered or nurtured. The poem invokes the classical idea of memento mori, a Latin phrase which states plainly to all mankind, “Remember that you must die.” The speaker considers the fact that in death, there is no difference between great and common people. The speaker of this poem sees a country churchyard at sunset, which impels him to meditate on the nature of human mortality. Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is noteworthy in that it mourns the death not of great or famous people, but of common men. An elegy is a poem which laments the dead. Gray may, however, have begun writing the poem in 1742, shortly after the death of his close friend Richard West. Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was first published in 1751.
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