Born at Cornhill, Gray spent most of his adult life in Cambridge, first at Peterhouse, then, driven away by the persecutions of rowdy undergraduates, at Pembroke, where Spenser had been. Gray is an allusive poet, highly conscious of his predecessors, and told a friend ‘he never sat down to compose poetry without reading Spenser for a considerable time previously.’1
It is worth saying something about a more recent predecessor, namely Pope. Gray was somewhat influenced by him – they did meet, though it is not known when – and ‘In 1752 he began a systematic study of the history of English poetry […] encouraged by a copy of Pope’s outline for such a history’.2 However, Gray notably contrasts Pope’s professionalism, for, while the latter lived by his pen, Gray’s ‘desire was to be looked upon as a private independent gentleman, who read for his amusement.’3 He spent a lot of time in post-Popean Twickenham, at Strawberry Hill, the house built by his friend Horace Walpole a third of a mile from Pope’s villa.
Gray could have been a Parkleys Poet Laureate alongside Dryden and Tennyson, but refused the Lord Chamberlain’s offer. Like Brooke, Gray wrote one outstandingly beloved poem, and it was for this that the laureateship was offered: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church‐Yard’. Bloom calls it ‘perhaps [the] most allusive of all poems in the language’, in which ‘Gray compounds Milton with Spenser’. The DNB says it is ‘one of the great poems of the English language; to many readers, learned and otherwise, it has stood almost for the idea of poetry itself.’ In closing this series on the Parkleys Poets, I’ll quote the opening and let it stand without comment.
The Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd wind slowly o’er the lea, The plowman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. (1–4)
Norton Nicholls.
Dictionary of National Biography.
William Johnson Temple.