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Bard
A Pindaric ode by Gray, published 1757, based on a tradition that Edward I ordered the violent suppression of the Welsh bards. It opens with the surviving Bard's cursing of the conqueror as he and ...
bardic poetry
A term of convenience to describe the corpus of verse in standardized literary language, and committed to quatrains in a variety of strict syllabic metres, that dominated poetic production in ...
Buckinghamshire
Has little geographical unity. The chalk hills of the Chilterns run across the middle of the county from south‐west to north‐east. Communications between north and south have always been poor, and ...
Christopher Anstey
(1724–1805),author of the New Bath Guide (1766), later illustrated by Cruikshank (1830), which consists of a series of letters in colloquial verse describing the adventures of squire Blunderhead and ...
Common Reader
The title of two collections of essays by V. Woolf, taken from Dr Johnson's life of Gray in Lives of the English Poets, which concludes with a famous paragraph in praise of the Elegy: ‘In the ...
consonance
Is the repetition of end or medial consonants, as in ‘blank’ and ‘think’, or ‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day’ (Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy’).
David Cecil
(1902–86)Scholar and biographer, educated at Eton College and Christ Church, Oxford, and Goldsmiths' professor of English literature at Oxford, 1948–69. His many works include a life of Melbourne (2 ...
Divina Commedia
The great work of Dante, comprising the Inferno, the Purgatorio, and the Paradiso, in terza rima.The Inferno is a description of Hell, conceived as a graduated conical funnel, to the successive ...
Edmund Gosse
Edmund Gosse (1849–1928) was the most influential arbiter of taste during the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth. Through readable essays ...
Edward Young
(1683–1765)Poet and clergyman, educated at Winchester College and Oxford University. His early literary contacts included Joseph Addison, Thomas Tickell, Aaron Hill, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander ...
elegiac
1 in prosody, the metre consisting of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter, as being the metre appropriate to elegies;2 generally, of the nature of an elegy.
elegy
(Fr.).A song of lament for the dead or for some melancholy event, or an instr. comp. with that suggestion, such as Elgar's Elegy for Strings and Fauré's Élégie.
Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard
A meditative poem in quatrains by T. Gray, published in 1751, but begun some years earlier. The churchyard is perhaps that of Stoke Poges, where Gray often visited members of his family. The poem, ...
Eton College
Founded by Henry VI in 1440, the school was modelled on the foundations of Winchester and New College, Oxford, set up by William of Wykeham.
Geoffrey Chaucer
(c. 1342–1400),English poet. His most famous work, the Canterbury Tales (c. 1387–1400), is a cycle of linked tales told by a group of pilgrims. His skills of characterization, humour, and versatility ...
graveyard poets
A term applied to 18th‐cent. poets who wrote melancholy, reflective works, often set in graveyards, on the theme of human mortality. Examples include T. Parnell's ‘Night‐Piece on Death’ (1721), E. ...
Gray, Thomas (1716–71) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to Chaucer
(1716–71).
The poet and scholar was an enthusiast for earlier English and European literature. His commonplace books contain
Gray, Thomas (1716–71) Quick reference
World Encyclopedia
His masterpiece was “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751). Other poems include “Ode on the Death of
Gray, Thomas Reference library
The Oxford Encyclopedia of British Literature
In recent years, literary critics and biographers have transformed our understanding of Thomas Gray (1716–1771) and of his
Gray, Thomas (1716–71) Reference library
The Oxford Companion to the Book
Gray’s wide-ranging literary and antiquarian interests were reflected in his collecting, which mainly comprised books on English literature and history (later, natural history as well), ...
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