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First page of Dodsley's illustrated edition of Gray's Elegy with illustration by Richard Bentley. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. [1] The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742.
He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. [1] Gray was a self-critical writer who published only 13 poems in his lifetime, despite being very popular. He was even offered the position of Poet Laureate in 1757 after the death of Colley Cibber, though he declined. [2]
The "Graveyard Poets", also termed "Churchyard Poets", [1] were a number of pre-Romantic poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms" [2] elicited by the presence of the graveyard. Moving beyond the elegy lamenting a single death, their purpose was rarely sensationalist.
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In 1751, Thomas Gray published "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", composed in the heroic stanza.Written in iambic pentameter, the poem followed the same metrical and structural patterns seen in Annus Mirabilis, but the use of the poetic form in an elegy gave it the title of the "elegiac decasyllabic quatrain". [3]
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In 1940, Harper & Brothers published an edition of Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, with thirty woodcut illustrations by Lankes and an introduction by Pulitzer prize-winning poet Robert P. T. Coffin. In 1941 Lankes was elected into the National Academy of Design as an Associate member and became a full Academician in 1954.
Richard Bentley, 1753 design for Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard. Bentley made drawings for Gray's poems, and some were published in 1753, as Designs by Mr. Bentley, for Six Poems by Mr. T. Gray. [6] [7] [8] It was influenced by French style, a rococo work showing also Gothic aspects and traces of chinoiserie. [9]