Talk:Thomas Gray

Fishy edit

64.250.194.65 introduced quite confusing Clinton Hamner name and date of birth as 1991 ... can we get revert?

I pondered the words "is considered as the representative poem of its age" and could not work out what they would mean...

• poem best representing life in the 18th century?
• poem best representing poetry of the 18th century?
• most important 18th century poem in the representative style?

As best is a POV term anyway, and the passive verb gives no attribution for the opinion, I decided to remove this language. Anybody want to rephrase more clearly? EdH 18:26, 30 Nov 2003 (UTC)

Elegy

Should we go into any more detail on the Elegy...or maybe offer it its own article? I'm inclined to think that at least some mention of notable phrases from the poem would be wise--"mute inglorious Milton", at least, is common enough that a search for that phrase on Google (with "-elegy" to remove most discussions of the phrase in its poetic context) provides several thousand hits. I'm not well up on Gray's writing, and I haven't read the poem in years, but if others think it would be a worthwhile addition I would pull something together. Jwrosenzweig 23:15, 12 July 2005 (UTC)

---

-I think we should definitely give it it's own article with some commentary and its legacy. --131.93.88.34 (talk) 21:06, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Collection of Works

Should we have a collection of works, or at least a list of his more popular works?
RWBronco 14:03, 27 July 2007 (UTC)

Elegy and Collection of Works

I vote for a separate article on the Elegy (with some details about it in this article) and the inclusion of a listing of Gray's works in this article. I also think it needs to be organized with headlines such as Personal Life, Academic Career, The Letters (describing the importance of Gray's letters to the history of the period), The Elegy, Other Major Works, etc. Aside from making the article more accessible, organizing it thus would encourage contributions to flesh it out more. McCune (talk) 21:01, 17 January 2008 (UTC)

Engraving Based on Gray's "Ode on a Spring"

If anyone would be interested, I just finished putting together a page on "The Hours", an engraving by Francesco Bartolozzi, after a work by Maria Cosway which was based on Thomas Gray's "Ode on a Spring".

I did not add this to the Thomas Gray page because I didn't see a clear place to put it, and therefore wasn't very comfortable editing your work.

By the way, could I suggest that you give the last section a title other than "Death"? I read that and burst out laughing. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Mrs rockefeller (talk • contribs) 20:42, 14 March 2008 (UTC)

Aj Cadiz WTF?

whose been monkeying around? —Preceding unsigned comment added by 81.77.168.184 (talk) 19:45, 8 September 2008 (UTC)

Early Life section in need of expert attention

I am a new editor and not a Gray expert, but I found some very unprofessional wording in this section. I removed the worst of it (a reference to Gray's uncle as "drugged up" and the last sentence ending with "and yeah" for example), but someone knowledgeable about Gray's life needs to fact-check this section to make it a more reliable reference. Gwenhyfara (talk) 16:06, 29 October 2008 (UTC)

I cut out the whole first paragraph and reverted to about six edits ago. Which at least looks plausible. It looks as if the entry was being used to carry some personal insults about someone in Australia. But someone who knows more about the subject ought to check the whole article.

KenBrown (talk) 12:53, 4 November 2008 (UTC)

"The Churchyard Poets"

I have deleted some bogus info on this non-existent or "virtual" entity. According to my research "The Churchyard Poets" are only known through internet mirrors of a defunct, bogus, wikipedia entry, and seem to have no other existence than this...There WAS a group called the Graveyard Poets but these were writing poetry a long time before Gray's Elegy. The first poem of the Graveyard school was Thomas Parnell's A Night-Piece on Death from 1721 when Gray was five years old... Colin4C (talk) 11:43, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

No, "churchyard poets" is a somewhat common handle for the same group. One finds it in print anthologies often enough. The reason you haven't discovered it is likely that the entire group is no longer regarded as a group at all. The critical classification was a post-facto label based on subject matter. It gave Gray's poem pre-eminence in time, when it only enjoys greater appreciation by critical opinion. In other words, because literary historians (and anthology makers) always put Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard in, even if they have almost nothing else from the 1750's, they try to make Young's Night Thoughts and Thompson's Winter a "churchyard" poem and make them into "churchyard poets."

Thus, the label is dubious, but it shouldn't be stricken as unattested.

What infuriates me is the text saying that perhaps Gray knew Goldsmith et al. and "shared thoughts" about death. Really? Goldsmith did know Gray, at least casually, but Gray was not well liked. He was regarded as an "outsider" in more ways than one, and the DNB entry indicates that the "undergraduate pranks" were more robust than just the tub of water. Goldsmith did not write about Gray in his essay "The Augustan Age" in The Bee, but the other poets certainly knew of Gray given his position at Cambridge. That, of course, carried a political and religious association in 1750. Cambridge was still the "Puritan/dissenter/new men" university and thus "the Whig" University, although those associations were fading in George II and III and the emergence of capitalism (Pitt the Younger). The point being that Gray was somewhat rejected/isolated from the new Whig groups around the younger Walpole (whose father hand controlled Parliament for around 30 years) and would have been viewed with suspicion by the Tory circles (Samuel Johnson's group among others).

Sharing thoughts about mortality? Well, that's the trick. Literary historians are now dispensing with the "pre-Romantic" label and recognizing that the decades between Pope and Wordsworth cannot be fit into any manifesto or theme. 98.16.174.137 (talk) 18:29, 5 November 2024 (UTC)

Westminster Abbey?

Poets Corner includes Gray as having a memorial, but none is mentioned here. Martinevans123 (talk) 13:14, 16 March 2010 (UTC)

Opening one of his veins

Gray's mother once saved his life by opening one of his veins with her hands.

There's a citation, but nothing online so it's not so easy to check. Could someone follow up on this? I can't think of any situations where "opening one of his veins" is a recognized lifesaving treatment. --Trovatore (talk) 18:56, 8 February 2016 (UTC)

Hmm, so actually I'm wrong about "nothing online" — the cite has a link to an article at bartleby.com. But unfortunately the source is no more enlightening than the text in question. Here's what it says:

Thomas Gray was the fifth and only surviving child of this marriage; the rest, to the number of seven, died in infancy; and his own life was saved by the prompt courage of his mother, who opened one of his veins with her own hand.

That's it. Nothing about what medical condition would have induced her to do this strange thing, or in what way it was supposed to help. I don't think we can rely on this claim without further explanation, even if the source is considered generally reliable for non-medical claims. I'm going to comment out the claim, but leave the reference for the claim about Gray's father. --Trovatore (talk) 10:55, 9 February 2016 (UTC)

Thomas Gray

Gray is such an immortal soul in English Literature that on his part gave a distinguished Linguistic purity to English Literature.His exact imagery, solemn meditation and authorised diction have made him an unparallel voice of true of feelings. Birbal Kumawat (talk) 08:34, 18 December 2017 (UTC)

Quote?

...often afraid of the shadows of his own fame

If this is a quotation, it should carry quote-marks. Otherwise I think it's not encyclopedic. Valetude (talk) 14:05, 12 February 2018 (UTC)

Scholarship

I believe he knew Welsh and Icelandic, as well as Latin and Greek, and probably French and Italian too. Can anyone confirm? Esedowns (talk) 00:44, 15 November 2021 (UTC)