Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray ( born December 26, 1716 in London, † 30 July 1771 in Cambridge ) was an English poet, scholar and writer letters.

Life

Thomas Gray was born in London and lived with his mother, after she had her abusive husband, a businessman, leave. Gray was educated at Eton and matriculated as a student at Peterhouse, Cambridge. At Eton he became friends with the late poet and landowner Richard Owen Cambridge and the early late Richard West. Later he moved to the Pembroke College, Cambridge. As a student he met Horace Walpole, whom he on his grand tour of central Europe accompanied in the years 1739-1741.

Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge. Although he was a relatively unproductive poet ( his published during his lifetime works comprise less than 1,000 lines ), he was, along with William Collins ( 1721-1759 ), the preeminent English poet shape of the mid-18th century. 1757, the post of Poet Laureate, he was offered, he declined. In 1768 he took over as successor to Lawrence Brockett ( 1724-1768 ) the Chair of History in Cambridge, never stopped there but lectures.

Grays Elegy Written in a Country Church - yard (1751 ) is regarded as the representative poem of the English sensibility. It is still one of the most popular and most frequently quoted poems in the English language. Gray is most likely created during a visit to the cemetery in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. Already a little later appeared with Contemplation (1753 ) by Richard Gifford, the first successful imitation. In other countries, the poem was influential; so marked that in 1802 published translation of Vasily Zhukovsky the beginning of the Russian romance.

As one of the most important representatives of the Churchyard Poets Gray developed the lyricism of his colleague Edward Young on, but his life was in contradiction of the works of James Thomson. Especially in Elegy Written in a Country Church - yard, he merged traditional poetic forms and diction with new topics and means of expression and can thus be considered as classical embossed and yet very willing to experiment Mitvorbereiter English Romanticism.

In his film Rushmore (1998), the American director Wes Anderson Gray cited in the inscription on a grave stone: "The Paths of Glory lead but to the Grave ".

Works

• Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes (1748 )
• Elegy Written in a Country Church - yard (1751 )
• The Fatal Sisters ( 1761)
• The Descent of Odin (1761 )