Gray's father was a scrivener while his mother and aunt kept a milliner's shop. He led a quiet, studious life in the main, training in law after his degree at Cambridge and then becoming a history done at Peterhouse.
Gray formed a friendship with Walpole which was broken off as a result of a disagreement during a "Grand Tour of Europe" (1734-39), though they were eventually reconciled in 1745. This friendship was important to Gray's literary career and Walpole later published The Progress of Poetry and The Bard, an impassioned summary of English history, on his Strawberry Hill Press. Gray sent his Ode on the Spring to an Etonian friend, Richard West, who died shortly afterwards, prompting the Sonnet on the Death of West. Gray was immensely popular and helped to create a new taste in poetry; fertile ground for the romantic poets to follow him. In 1757 at the death of the Poet
Laureate Cibber, the post was offered to Gray, but he refused it.
Poems by this Poet
Poem |
Post date | Rating | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|
| Epitaph on Mrs Jane Clarke | 29 November 2013 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Epitaph on Sir William Williams | 5 September 2014 |
No votes yet |
0 |
| Fragment | 19 May 2014 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Hymn To Adversity | 29 November 2013 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Hymn to Ignorance | 19 May 2014 |
(2 votes) |
0 |
| Love and Science | 19 May 2014 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Now the golden morn aloft | 29 November 2013 |
(2 votes) |
0 |
| Ode for Music | 19 May 2014 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Ode On A Distant Prospect Of Eton College | 31 May 2013 |
(1 vote) |
0 |
| Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cat, Drowned in a Tub of Gold Fishes | 19 May 2014 |
(1 vote) |
0 |