Title: An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript
Author: Thomas Gray
Release Date: March 18, 2005 [EBook #15409]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ASCII
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THOMAS GRAY
An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard
(1751)
and
The Eton College Manuscript
With an Introduction by
George Sherburn
Publication Number 31
Los Angeles
Williams Andrews Clark Memorial Library
University of California
1951
GENERAL EDITORS
H. Richard Archer, Clark Memorial Library
Richard C. Boys, University of Michigan
John Loftis, University of California,
Los Angeles
ASSISTANT EDITOR
W. Earl Britton, University of Michigan
ADVISORY EDITORS
Emmett L. Avery, State College of Washington
Benjamin Boyce, Duke University
Louis I. BREDVOLD, University of Michigan
CLEANTH Brooks, Yale University
James L. Clifford, Columbia University
ARTHUR FRIEDMAN, University of Chicago
EDWARD NILES HOOKER, University of California,
Los Angeles
LOUIS A. LANDA, Princeton University
SAMUEL H. MONK, University of Minnesota
ERNEST MOSSNER, University of Texas
JAMES SUTHERLAND, University College, London
H.T. SWEDENBERG, JR., University of California,
Los Angeles
INTRODUCTION
To some the eighteenth-century definition of proper poetic matter is unacceptable; but to any who believe that true poetry may (if not “must”) consist in “what oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed,” Gray’s “Churchyard” is a majestic achievement—perhaps (accepting the definition offered) the supreme achievement of its century. Its success, so the great critic of its day thought, lay in its appeal to “the common reader”; and though no friend of Gray’s other work, Dr. Johnson went on to commend the “Elegy” as abounding “with images which find a mirrour