Thomas Gray

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Thomas Gray

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

Life

Thomas Gray was born in London and lived with his mother after she left her abusive husband, a businessman. Gray was educated at Eton and enrolled as a student at Peterhouse , Cambridge . In Eton he made friends with the later poet and landowner Richard Owen Cambridge and Richard West, son of the Lord Chancellor of Ireland Richard West , who died early . He later moved to Pembroke College , Cambridge. As a schoolboy he met Horace Walpole , whom he accompanied on his grand tour through Central Europe from 1739 to 1741 .

Gray spent most of his life as a scholar at Cambridge. Although he was a relatively unproductive poet (his works published during his lifetime are less than 1,000 lines), he was, next to William Collins (1721-1759), the outstanding English poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757 he was offered the post of Poet Laureate , which he refused. In 1768 he took over as the successor to Lawrence Brockett (1724–1768) his chair of history, the Regius Professor of Modern History , in Cambridge, but never gave lectures there.

Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard ( 1751 ) is considered the representative poem of English sensitivity . It remains one of the most popular and widely quoted poems in the English language. Gray created it most likely during a visit to Stoke Poges , Buckinghamshire cemetery , but worked for almost eight years on the - regardless of its popular nature - the extremely complex structure of the Elegy , combining elements of classical form and expression with romantic attitudes and sentiments. With his haunting evocation of the country cemetery bathed in twilight, Gray succeeded not only in expressing a new sense of nature, but also in poetic articulating the intense sympathy with the unknown dead in the cemetery. At the same time, the final part of the poem skilfully leads into the realms of the subjective and internal, in that the poet joins the dead in the cemetery through projection and includes himself in the elegy in the form of an epitaph . A little later, Richard Gifford's Contemplation ( 1753 ) was the first successful imitation. The poem was influential in other countries too; The translation by Wassili Schukowski , published in 1802, marks the beginning of Russian Romanticism.

As one of the most important representatives of the Churchyard Poets , Gray developed the poetry of his colleague Edward Young , but found himself in contradiction to the work of James Thomson throughout his life . Right now in Elegy Written in a Country Church yard . he merged traditional poetic forms and diction with new themes and means of expression and can thus be regarded as a classicist, yet extremely experimental pioneer of English Romanticism .

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

Works

literature

Web links

Commons : Thomas Gray  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Wolfgang G. Müller: Gray, Thomas. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 245.
  2. See Wolfgang G. Müller: Gray, Thomas. In: Eberhard Kreutzer, Ansgar Nünning (Hrsg.): Metzler Lexicon of English-speaking authors . 631 portraits - from the beginning to the present. Metzler, Stuttgart / Weimar 2002, ISBN 3-476-01746-X , p. 245 f.