Thomas Gray (1716–1771) was an English poet and scholar, author of the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, one of the most famous and most quoted poems in English. A Cambridge professor who published very little, he also wrote odes such as The Bard and The Progress of Poesy, and his letters are among the finest of his century.
Works
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard
A London childhood
Thomas Gray was born in London in 1716, the only one of twelve children to survive infancy. His father was violent, and his mother, who ran a milliner's shop with her sister, paid for his education at Eton. There he formed close friendships with Horace Walpole and Richard West.
He went on to Peterhouse, Cambridge, and in 1739 set off with Walpole on a grand tour of France and Italy. The two friends quarrelled and separated in 1741, and Gray returned home alone; they were reconciled a few years later.
The Elegy
The death of Richard West in 1742 deeply affected Gray and inspired his first serious poems. Around this time he began the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, a meditation on the obscure lives and deaths of country people, which he worked on for several years.
Published in 1751, the Elegy was an immediate and immense success, reprinted many times within months. Gray, who disliked fame, refused the post of Poet Laureate when it was offered to him in 1757.
The Cambridge scholar
Gray spent most of his life at Cambridge, first at Peterhouse, then at Pembroke College, studying Greek, history, botany and Old Norse and Welsh poetry. His odes The Progress of Poesy and The Bard were printed in 1757 by Horace Walpole's private press at Strawberry Hill.
In 1768 he was appointed Regius Professor of Modern History, though he never gave a lecture. He travelled in the Lake District and Scotland, recording the landscapes in his journals. He died in Cambridge in 1771 and was buried at Stoke Poges, beside his mother.
Anecdotes
The fire escape
Terrified of fire, Gray had an iron bar fixed outside his window at Peterhouse so that he could escape by a rope ladder. According to a story, students raised a false alarm one night, and Gray climbed down into a tub of water placed beneath. He moved to Pembroke soon afterwards.
Quebec
On the eve of the battle of Quebec in 1759, the British general James Wolfe is said to have recited Gray's Elegy to his officers and declared that he would rather have written it than take Quebec. He was killed in the battle the next day.
Frequently asked questions
What is Thomas Gray's most famous poem?
The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.
Where is the churchyard of Gray's Elegy?
It is traditionally identified with the churchyard of St Giles at Stoke Poges, in Buckinghamshire, where Gray is buried.
Did Gray become Poet Laureate?
No. He was offered the post in 1757 but declined it.