Paths of Glory: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

About this episode

This episode explores Thomas Gray's influential poem 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' and its impact on English poetry.

In 1751, a little-known Cambridge academic called Thomas Gray published “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and became a household name. His poem was a funeral elegy about the sun going down over the graves of long-forgotten people whom Gray didn’t know. They happened to be buried in the same small country churchyard as his aunt and mother (and, eventually, himself), in the village of Stoke Poges. It was an instant smash, topping the literary charts and going into multiple reprints, editions, and translations - and spawning a minor sub-industry of satires and parodies. If you’ve ever heard of the “graveyard school” of poetry, Thomas Gray is its genius, and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by far its most famous and influential poem. Gray had a huge impact on the Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Colerdige, Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tennyson, Browning, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin were all indebted to him – and countless others. Generations of British schoolchildren know Gray’s poem by heart, so today Sophie and Jonty are digging up the dirt on this graveyard poem to ask what all the fuss is about. Why is this one of the most important and prized works in English…

People in this episode

Hosts: Sophie Gee, Jonty Claypole

Topics covered

• Thomas Gray
• Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard
• Romantic poetry
• literary history
• influence on poets

Keywords

• Thomas Gray
• Elegy
• poetry
• Romantic poets
• literary influence
• graveyard school

Mentioned in this episode

Books & works: Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

Places: Stoke Poges

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