Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray was an English poet born on December 26, 1716, in Cornhill, London. His father, Philip Gray, was a scrivener, and his mother Dorothy (née Antrobus), was a milliner. From 1725 to 1734, Gray began attending Eton College, a prestigious boarding school that he wrote about in “Eton College Ode,” his first poem published anonymously in 1747. As a student at Eton, Gray developed a close relationship with Richard West and created an exclusive friend group with historian Thomas Ashton and writer Horace Walpole called the “Quadruple Alliance,” which devoted itself to classical poetry.

In 1734, Gray was admitted to Peterhouse College, Cambridge, before leaving after four years without a degree. In 1739, he and Walpole began their Grand Tour together, customary cultural travel for wealthy European boys, through France and Italy. In 1741, Gray returned to London a month before his father’s death. In 1742, he experienced the death of his lover, Richard West, described in the poem, “On the Death of Richard West.” That same year, Gray began attending Peterhouse College and graduated with a law degree the following year.

Gray’s best known poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” was published in 1751 after threats from a magazine to publish an unauthorized copy of the manuscript and at the urging of Horace Walpole. Despite the fame of this elegy, Gray’s collections, with their classical style and obfuscation, were contrasted with the rise of the Romantic poets. A critique written by Gray’s contemporary, John Mitford, echoes this:

In a short metre, the images and language will be presented to the mind of a practised writer, by the confinement of the rhyme, and strictness of the measure, condensed, and moulded nearly into their finished form … Whereas in blank verse, and other measures of looser texture and greater length the same thoughts would have room to expand into various shapes; would be capable of admitting different alterations and combinations of language; and the genius of the poet might, as it were, flower off into something of a wild and romantic luxuriance.

In Classic Writings on Poetry (Columbia University Press, 2003), author William Harmon wrote an essay after “The Progress of Poesy,” published in 1758, in which Gray wrote himself as a successor of Shakespeare, John Milton, and John Dryden:

Gray was a bridge, or at least a bridge-builder, between the neoclassical values of the Augustan age and the romantic values of the late eighteenth century … Gray, learned in the classical languages and also conversant with Old Celtic and Old Germanic texts, which were being rediscovered, could see the English poetry of his own age as part of a community of texts shared in space and as part of a continuum of endeavor extending from the earliest ages of the species.

Thomas Gray died on July 30, 1771, in Cambridge, England.