SOURCE: “From Gray's Elegy to Foscolo's Carme: Highlighting the Mediation and Sublimation of the ‘Sepulchral,’” in Symposium, Vol. 47, No. 2, Summer, 1993, pp. 117-31.

In the following essay, Illiano examines Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, which was known to Foscolo, for the influence it had on Foscolo's Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis and The Sepulchres. The critic also discusses Ippolito Pindemonte's I Cimiteri and its effect on The Sepulchres.

Widely acclaimed as a masterwork of poetic expression, Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard had a far-reaching impact on Italian literature of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Gray was hailed as the new Pindar of England, “poeta caldo, fantastico, armonioso, sublime,”¹ and the Elegy, his major composition, was soon featured among the most challenging projects in literary translation. The first version, a masterful Elegia di Tommaso Gray sopra un cimitero di campagna in unrhymed...