Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray (December 26, 1716 – July 30, 1771), was an English poet, classical scholar and professor of Cambridge University. He was born in Cornhill, London, the son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of eight children and the only child in his family to survive infancy. He lived with his mother after she left his abusive father. He was educated at Eton College where his uncle was one of the masters. He recalled his schooldays as a time of great happiness, as is evident in his Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College. Gray was a delicate and naturally scholarly boy who spent his time reading great literature and avoiding athletics. Probably fortunately for himself, he was able to live in his uncle’s household rather than in college. He made three close friends: Horace Walpole, son of Prime Minister Robert Walpole, Thomas Ashton and Richard West. The four of them prided themselves on their sense of style, their sense of humour and their appreciation of beauty.

In 1734, Gray went to Cambridge. At first he stayed in Pembroke College, moving to Peterhouse, but he found the curriculum dull. He wrote letters to his friends listing all the things he disliked: the masters (mad with Pride) and the Fellows (sleepy, drunken, dull, illiterate Things.) Supposedly he was intended for the law, but in fact he spent his time as an undergraduate reading classical and modern literature and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation. In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Horace Walpole on his Grand Tour, probably at Walpole's expense. They fell out and parted in Tuscany because Walpole wanted to attend fashionable parties and Gray wanted to visit all the antiquities. However, they were reconciled a few years later.

He began seriously writing poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a self-imposed programme of literary study, becoming one of the most learned men of his time, though he claimed to be lazy by inclination. He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College, Cambridge. It is said that the change of college was the result of a practical joke: Terrified of fire, he had installed a metal bar by his window on the top floor of the Burrough’s building at Peterhouse, so that in the event of a fire he could tie his sheets to it and climb to safety. One night undergraduates decided to play a prank and shouted “fire”. Gray climbed down from his window, landing in a barrel of water placed beneath.[citation needed]

Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only later in his life did he begin travelling again. Although he was one of the least productive poets (his collected works published during his lifetime amount to less than 1,000 lines), he is regarded as the predominant poetic figure of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. In 1768, he succeeded Lawrence Brockett as Regius Professor of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure.

Gray was so self critical and fearful of failure that he only published thirteen poems during his lifetime, and once wrote that he feared his collected works would be mistaken for the works of a flea. Gray’s friend Walpole said that He never wrote anything easily but things of Humour, and this is evident in the mock elegy he wrote to commemorate the death by drowning of Walpole’s cat, Ode on the death of a favourite Cat, drowned in a tub of Gold fishes. Walpole later displayed the fatal china vase on a pedestal at his house in Strawberry Hill. Gray’s surviving letters also show his sharp observation and his playful sense of humour.

Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (written 1750 , published Feb 1751 by Dodsley), believed to have been written in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, was a literary sensation when it was published and has become a lasting contribution to English literary heritage. Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and it was pirated, imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek. It is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language. Before the Battle of the Plains of Abraham, British General James Wolfe is said to have recited it to his officers, adding: "Gentlemen, I would rather have written that poem than take Quebec tomorrow". The poem's famous depiction of an "ivy-mantled tow'r" could be a reference to the early-mediaeval St Laurence's Church in Upton, Slough.

Gray combined traditional forms and poetic diction with new topics and modes of expression and may be considered as a classically focussed precursor of the romantic revival.


Tomb of Thomas Gray in Stoke Poges ChurchyardThe Elegy was recognised immediately for its beauty and skill, and the Churchyard Poets are so named because they wrote in the shadow of Gray's great poem. It contains many outstanding phrases which have entered the common English lexicon, either on their own or as referenced in other works. A few of these include:

"Far from the madding crowd"
"The paths of glory"
"Celestial fire"
"The unlettered muse"
"Kindred spirit"
Gray also wrote light verse, such as Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes, concerning Horace Walpole's cat, which had recently died trying to fish goldfish out of a bowl. After setting the scene with the couplet "What female heart can gold despise? What cat's averse to fish?", the poem moves to its multiple proverbial conclusion: "a fav'rite has no friend", "[k]now one false step is ne'er retrieved" and ""nor all that glisters, gold".

He is also well known for his statement that "where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise," from his 1742 Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College.

Gray himself considered that his two Pindaric odes, The Progress of Poesy and The Bard, were his best works. Pindaric odes are written with great fire and passion, unlike the calmer and more reflective Horatian odes such as Ode on a distant Prospect of Eton College. The Bard tells of a wild Welsh poet cursing Edward I after the conquest of Wales and prophesying in detail the downfall of the house of Plantagenet. It is very melodramatic, and ends with the bard hurling himself to his death from the top of a mountain.

When his duties allowed, Gray travelled widely throughout Britain to places like Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Scotland in search of picturesque scenery and ancient monuments. These things were not generally valued in the early eighteenth century, when the popular taste ran to classical styles in architecture and literature and people liked their scenery tame and well-tended. Some people have seen Gray’s writings on this topic, and the Gothic details that appear in his Elegy and The Bard as the first foreshadowing of the Romantic movement that dominated the early nineteenth century, when William Wordsworth and the other Lake poets had taught people to value the picturesque, the sublime and the Gothic.

Interestingly, however, Gray's connection to Wordsworth is vexed. In the 1800 Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, it is Gray's "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West" which Wordsworth singles out to exemplify what he finds most objectionable in poetry. He even goes so far as to castigate West as "at the head of those who by their reasonings have attempted to widen the space of separation betwixt Prose and Metrical composition, and was more than any other man curiously elaborate in the structure of his own poetic diction."

When Gray died in 1771, he was buried beside his mother in the graveyard of the church in Stoke Poges which was the setting for his Elegy. His grave can still be seen there today. There is a plaque in Cornhill, marking the place where he was born.