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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