Gray, Thomas (1716-1771), was an English poet. His masterpiece, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751), is one of the best-known poems in the English language. Its theme is the common fate of common people, who live and die unnoticed and unremembered. The poem includes the famous line “The paths of glory lead but to the grave.” See “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.
Gray was born on Dec. 26, 1716, in London and attended Eton College and Cambridge University. He spent much of his life as a scholar at Cambridge. Gray traveled through France and Italy from 1739 to 1741, and later made many trips through Scotland and the English Lake District. His journals of these travels reveal Gray’s appreciation of nature.
Gray’s first published poem was “Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College” (1747). It includes the famous line “… where ignorance is bliss/’Tis folly to be wise.” Other major early poems are “Hymn to Adversity” and a sonnet on the death of a friend, Richard West. All were written at his mother’s home in Stoke Poges, the village of the churchyard depicted in his famous elegy. The language reflects Gray’s fondness for the artificial diction typical of poetry of his time. But he illustrated a new trend toward Romanticism in his mood of melancholy moralizing. A Romantic feeling appears in his odes “The Bard” (1757) and “The Progress of Poesy” (1757), written in the style of the Greek poet Pindar.
Although a shy man, Gray carried on a large correspondence. His letters to such friends as the author-politician Horace Walpole, are themselves examples of a minor art form of the period. Gray died on July 30, 1771.
