Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard

Sandro Jung (Shanghai University of Finance and Economics)

Ed. by Janet Todd, University of Cambridge
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 1.2.1.05: English Writing and Culture from the Glorious Revolution to the French Revolution, 1689-1789.
Vol. editors: Paul Baines (University of Liverpool), Daniel Cook (University of Dundee), Pat Rogers (University of South Florida), Nicholas Seager (University of Keele)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1751

Places

England (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Elegy
Poetry (any)

Resources

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Recommended Reading

Thomas Gray's most important poem

Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

is one of those rare mid-eighteenth-century poems that, like William Collins'

Ode to Evening

, has survived scholarly scrutiny and has been reprinted and extensively commented on in the twentieth century. It is one of the compositions that best express the graveyard tradition, crystallising in the 1740s with texts such as Robert Blair's

The Grave

and Edward Young's

Night Thoughts

. Gray started work on the poem in about 1742 and had it printed in 1751 by Horace Walpole at his private Strawberry Hill Press in Twickenham. Apart from the version printed by Walpole and subsequently adopted by such anthologists as Dodsley or Chalmers, there exists the “Eton Manuscript”, a variant entitled “Stanza's Write in a Country…

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889 words

Citation: Jung, Sandro. "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 30 October 2002 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=5392, accessed 23 November 2024.]

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Thomas Gray, Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard

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