ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Thomas Gray (26 December 1716 – 30 July 1771) was an English poet, letter-writer, classical scholar, and professor at Pembroke College, Cambridge. He is widely known for his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751.

Detailed explanation-2: -Thomas Gray, (born Dec. 26, 1716, London-died July 30, 1771, Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, Eng.), English poet whose “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” is one of the best known of English lyric poems.

Detailed explanation-3: -Examples include John Milton’s “Lycidas”; Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam”; and Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” More recently, Peter Sacks has elegized his father in “Natal Command, ” and Mary Jo Bang has written “You Were You Are Elegy” and other poems for her son.

Detailed explanation-4: -Thomas Gray began work on the “Elegy” in 1742. The setting may be in Stoke Poges, where Gray’s mother was buried, and where his own remains would eventually lie. But the poem was probably composed in Cambridge, and the curfew tolled by the bell of Great St Mary’s.

Detailed explanation-5: -The elegy became a popular subgroup of pastoral poetry, attributed to the poet Theocritus in his Idylls. In the 1st century B.C., the Roman poet Propertius composed a collection of elegies, appropriately entitled Elegies.