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3 unusual facts about Thomas Gray


Caton with Littledale

The poet Thomas Gray wrote "every feature which constitutes a perfect landscape of the extensive sort is here not only boldly marked, but in its best position".

Everdon

Some say that it was the Churchyard of St Mary’s and not St Giles, Stoke Poges that was the inspiration for Thomas Gray’s famous elegy “In an English Churchyard”.

Old Gray Cemetery

Named for English poet Thomas Gray (1716–1771), Old Gray Cemetery is an example of a so-called garden cemetery, a mid-19th century style that sought the transition of graveyards from urban churchyards to quiet suburban plots.


1771 in poetry

July 30 – Thomas Gray (born 1716), English poet, classical scholar and professor at Cambridge University; died in Cambridge, then buried beside his mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, the setting for his famous 1750 poem, Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard

André Chénier

Although John Milton and James Thomson seem to have interested him, and a few of his verses show slight inspiration from Shakespeare and Thomas Gray, it would be an exaggeration to say Chénier studied English literature.

Gothicismus

In other parts of Europe, the interest in Norse mythology, history and language was represented by Englishmen Thomas Gray, John Keats and William Wordsworth, and Germans Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock.

Laurence Eusden

In addition to Pope's skewering of Eusden's abilities, Thomas Gray, author of "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", said that "Eusden set out well in life, but afterwards turned out a drunkard and besotted his faculties".

Marie Anne de Vichy-Chamrond, marquise du Deffand

Madame du Deffand is said by Horace Walpole (in a letter to Thomas Gray) to have been for a short time the mistress of the regent, the duke of Orléans.

Snow Storm: Hannibal and his Army Crossing the Alps

Turner may also have been inspired by a lost oil painting of Hannibal's army descending the Alps into northern Italy by watercolourist John Robert Cozens, A Landscape with Hannibal in His March over the Alps, Showing to His Army the Fertile Plains of Italy, the only oil painting that Cozens exhibited at the Royal Academy, and also an entry in list of imaginary paintings written by Thomas Gray, which speculated that Salvator Rosa could have painted "Hannibal passing the Alps".

The Etching Club

The club published illustrated editions of works by authors such as Oliver Goldsmith, Shakespeare, John Milton and Thomas Gray.


see also

Battle of Old Byland

In all of Lothian the English are said only to have found one lame cow, causing the Earl of Surrey to remark; This is the dearest beef I ever saw. It surely has cost a thousand pounds and more! In the Scalicronica, Sir Thomas Gray describes the whole campaign thus;

Old Gray Cemetery

At the suggestion of Reese's wife, Henrietta, the cemetery was named after English poet Thomas Gray, author of Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard.