On Gentle Melancholy Expressed in My Reading Of
Elegy by Thomas Gray
T homas Gray was a scholor of Greek and history, he was also a great poet.
In the 18th century,art was regarded as artificial, thus the popularity of orate, flowery language. The Romantics wanted art not to be so artificial.Gray’s style is sophisticated and allusive, his poems are often marked with the trait of a highly artificial diction.
Thomas Gray was born on December 26th,1716 in Cornhill, London.The son of an exchange broker and a milliner. He was the fifth of 12 children and the only child in his family to survive infancy, his father Philip Gray treated his mother with extreme cruetly. He lived with his mother after she left his abusive father. At Eton, Thomas Gray made three close friends:Horace Walpole,Thomas Ashton and Richard West. In 1734, Gray entered Peterhouse College,Cambridge University, when he studied for four years, he was intended for the law, but in fact he spent his time reading classical and modern literature, the kind of experiences gave him the resource of writing poem. After Gray returned from the continental tour, his father died, he moved to the village of Stoke Poges. In 1742,Gray returned to Peterhouse, as a fellow and finally he took the degree of Bachelor of civil law, then he remained at
Cambridge and began a self-imposed progamme of literary and Greek study. In 1742,Gray seemed to apply himself seriously to poetry and in this year he published his early poems of importance his odes Odeon Spring,On A Distant Prospect of Eton College, Hymn to Adversity. After his best friend Richard West died, he started on his greatest masterpiece Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard which established his reputation.
“elegy”from Latin “elegeia”, in classical literature, the poems with the rhythem mainly express personnel sadness and carre about natutal. Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard is a memorial to his died friend Richard West. The poem is an elegy in name but not inform, it employs a similar style to contemporary but it embodies a meditation on death and rememberance can be goog and bad, and Gray found comfort in pondering the lines of the obscure rustics in the country yard.
Thomas Gray used sentimentalism to express his feelings. Sentimentalism is one of the important trends in English literature of the middle and later decades of the 18th century. Along with a new vision of love.Sentimentalism presented a new view of human nature which prized feeling over thinking passion over reason and personal instincts of “pity, trenderness, and benevolence over social duties. Literary work of the sentimentalism, marked by a sincere sympathy
