Download or read book The Poetry of Thomas Gray written by Thomas Gray, Sir and published by Portable Poetry. This book was released on 2014-11-21 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Gray was born on 26 December 1716 in Cornhill in London. His father was a scrivener and his mother a milliner. He was the fifth of twelve children and the only one to survive. With his father becoming mentally unwell and abusing his wife she left with Thomas in tow for a safer life. Thomas was sent to Eton, where two of his uncles worked, and although he was a delicate and scholarly child with an aversion to sports he found it suited him. Whilst there he made three close friends; Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Thomas Ashton, and Richard West. The four prided themselves on their style, humour, and appreciation of beauty. They were called the "quadruple alliance." In 1734 Gray went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge. Although his family wished him to study law he spent most of his time reading classical and modern literature, and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation. In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Walpole on his Grand Tour of Europe. It was Walpole who later helped publish Gray's poetry. Gray began to seriously write poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a programme of literary study. Gray was a brilliant bookworm, a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar. He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College where he had moved after the students at Peterhouse played a prank on him. It is thought that Gray began writing his masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of St Giles parish church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in 1742. After several years of leaving it unfinished, he completed it in 1750. When Gray sent it to Walpole, Walpole sent off the poem as a manuscript and it appeared in many magazines. Gray then published the poem himself and received the credit he was due. The poem was a literary sensation. Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and despite the piracy it was imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek. Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only travelled again later in life. Although he wrote little he is regarded by some as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. Gray was extremely self-critical and feared failure. He once wrote that he feared his collected works would be "mistaken for the works of a flea." Gray came to be known as one of the "Graveyard poets" of the late 18th century, along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, and Christopher Smart. Gray perhaps knew these men, sharing ideas about death, mortality, and the finality of death. In 1768, after the death of Lawrence Brockett the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure which carried a salary of 400, fell vacant and Gray secured the position. Thomas Gray died on 30 July 1771 in Cambridge, and was buried beside his mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, the setting for his famous Elegy.
Download or read book Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard and Other Poems written by Thomas Gray and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2009-04-02 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The English countryside has inspired some of the most exquisite and well-loved poetry ever composed in the language. This selection of verse includes, among others, Thomas Gray's reflective and moving meditation on mortality, 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', the soaring beauty of Wordsworth's lines on Tintern Abbey and Keats's ode to Autumn, the deceptively simple words of Emily Brontë and the personal and evocative verse of Thomas Hardy, bringing together the greatest riches of English poetry. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).
Download or read book Select Poems of Thomas Gray written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1876 with total page 162 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selected Poems of Thomas Gray Charles Churchill and William Cowper written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elegy in a Country Churchyard written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1888 with total page 66 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Blake s Water Colours for the Poems of Thomas Gray written by William Blake and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2013-12-31 with total page 129 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 116 watercolors illustrate 13 best-loved poems by Thomas Gray, including "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat." First inexpensive full-color reproduction, with complete text of poems.
Download or read book Thomas Gray written by Robert L. Mack and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2000-01-01 with total page 768 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Mack incorporates recent scholarship on Gray, drawing on developments in 18th-century and gender studies, as well as on extensive archival research into the life of the poet and his family. The result is an eloquent and enlightening book, sure to be the definitive biography of this great poet, a forefather of the Romantic Movement. 50 illustrations.
Download or read book Again to the Life of Eternity written by Frank A. Vaughan and published by Associated University Presse. This book was released on 1996 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This work postulates that the set of 116 designs by William Blake, illustrated herein, is not a series of individual responses to the pieces of text they accompany, nor is it a series of responses to the individual poems of Thomas Gray. The designs are also more than illustrations, or corrections, of Gray's speakers or of Gray himself. In the Gray designs, Blake was using the opportunity given him by John and Ann Flaxman in 1797 to explore and explain visually the reformist malaise in the reactionary nineties when the general economic well-being and optimism had been replaced by the effects of war and fear. For Blake, the collapse into the later 1790s is the failure of the imaginative will to sustain the impetus that the American and French Revolutions had begun." "Blake saw several causes for this failure of will and created a set of designs rich in allusions and dense with visual conventions. These visual topoi are personal, topical, classical, biblical, and literary." "Thus, there is a need for a study of the Gray designs that sees them as they are: a unity rich with visual conventions partaking of Blake's revolutionary pattern of development and desire to reshape in specific ways the mind of his audience."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book Selections from the Poetry and Prose of Thomas Gray written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1894 with total page 250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Ode on the Spring written by Thomas Gray and published by CUP Archive. This book was released on 1921 with total page 76 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Essays and Criticisms written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1911 with total page 444 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Gray s Poems written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1845 with total page 92 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Works of Thomas Gray written by Thomas Gray and published by . This book was released on 1858 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book A Companion to Eighteenth Century Poetry written by Christine Gerrard and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2014-02-10 with total page 624 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY A COMPANION TO & EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY POETRY Edited by Christine Gerrard This wide-ranging Companion reflects the dramatic transformation that has taken place in the study of eighteenth-century poetry over the past two decades. New essays by leading scholars in the field address an expanded poetic canon that now incorporates verse by many women poets and other formerly marginalized poetic voices. The volume engages with topical critical debates such as the production and consumption of literary texts, the constructions of femininity, sentiment and sensibility, enthusiasm, politics and aesthetics, and the growth of imperialism. The Companion opens with a section on contexts, considering eighteenth-century poetry’s relationships with such topics as party politics, religion, science, the visual arts, and the literary marketplace. A series of close readings of specific poems follows, ranging from familiar texts such as Pope’s The Rape of the Lock to slightly less well-known works such as Swift’s “Stella” poems and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Town Eclogues. Essays on forms and genres, and a series of more provocative contributions on significant themes and debates, complete the volume. The Companion gives readers a thorough grounding in both the background and the substance of eighteenth-century poetry, and is designed to be used alongside David Fairer and Christine Gerrard’s Eighteenth-Century Poetry: An Annotated Anthology (3rd edition, 2014).
Download or read book The Fatal Sisters written by Anon and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 5 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Selected Poems written by Thomas Gray and published by Fyfield Books. This book was released on 1981 with total page 104 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
