'Where Ignorance is bliss/"Tis folly to be wise,' from Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College is one example. Extracts from his Elegy Written In A Country Churchyard have also become part of the literary heritage: 'Full many a flower is born to blush unseen,/ And waste its sweetness on the desert air'; 'Far from the madding Crowd's ignoble strife'; and a reference to life's 'cool sequestered vale' undoubtedly carry a familiar ring.
However, Gray (1716-71) would have been content for his name to rest in anonymity, his poems only circulating among his associates. The London-born son of a City scrivener, he was educated at Eton between 1725 and 1734, where one of his closest friends was Horace Walpole, who would arrange for the first, anonymous, publication of Gray's odes in 1747. Like Walpole, Gray attended Cambridge, but, although his intention was to prepare for a career as a London barrister, he returned to the university city after taking a two-year Grand Tour of Europe in the company of Walpole between 1739-41. In Cambridge, pursuing his literary interests as a gentleman scholar, he would effectively live for the remainder of his life.
Gray had begun writing English language poetry in the early 1740s, and Elegy may have had its origins in some lines penned on the death of another of his Eton friends, Richard West, in 1742, an event that caused him much grief. In fact, Gray had unknowingly sent
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