An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard (1751) and The Eton College Manuscript

This is a poetry book. 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 in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo'. Universality, clarity, incisive lapidary diction—these qualities may be somewhat staled in praise of the 'classical' style, yet it is precisely in these traits that the 'Elegy' proves most nobly. The artificial figures of rhetorical arrangement that are so omnipresent in the antitheses, chiasmuses, parallelisms, etc, of Pope and his school are in Gray's best quatrains unobtrusive or even infrequent.