Thomas Gray

Gray, Thomas 

Born Dec. 26, 1716, in Cornhill, London; died July 30. 1771, in Cambridge. English poet.

Gray was educated at Cambridge University. His best work is the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1751). Its melancholy, its idea of death as the equalizer of rich and poor, and its idealization of patriarchal country life make the poem a vivid model of sentimentalism and lyricism. In Russia, the elegy is well known in V. A. Zhukovskii’s translation (1802, under the title A Country Churchyard). In his later works Gray showed an interest in the traditions of popular history and mythology, which was characteristic of the period of the emergence of preromanticism.

WORKS

The Works in Prose and Verse, vols. 1–4. London-New York 1902–06.

REFERENCES

Istoriia angliiskoi literatury, vol. 1, fasc. 2. Moscow-Leningrad, 1945. Pages 550–54.
Jones, W. P. Thomas Gray, Scholar. New York, 1965.

E. V. KORNILOVA