Thomas Gray.ppt.pptVIP

* Thomas Gray 1716—1771 By Aileen Thomas Gray was born in 1716, of middle-class parents. He was the only one of 12 children to survive infancy. In 1727 Thomas become a pupil at Eton, where he met several bookish friends, included Richard West and Horace Walpole, son of England’s first modern-style prime minster and later an important man of letters. Gray attended Cambridge University from 1734 to 1738 . After leaving the university without a degree he undertook the grand tour of Europe with Walpole from1739 to 1741.In 1742 Gray returned to Cambridge and took a law degree the next year. Gray declined the poet laureateship in 1757. After a somewhat hypochondriacal middle age he died on July 30,1771. Sentimentalism one of the significant and popular trends in English literature in the second half of the 18 century is Sentimentalism. Sentimentalism is overindulgence in one’s emotion for the sake of his overwhelming discontent towards the social reality, and pessimistic belief and emphasis upon the virtue of man . The Graveyard School (墓地派诗歌） The Graveyard School refers to 18th-century school of English poets who wrote primarily about human mortality .Often set in a graveyard ,their poems mused on the vicissitudes of life ,the solitude of death and the grave ,and the anguish of bereavement. Their air of pensive gloom presaged the melancholy of the Romantic Movement . The most famous graveyard poems were Robert Blair’s The Grave ,Edward Young’s nine volume The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life , Death ,and Immortality and Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. Gray’s poems not more than ten poem hand handed down, among them with the first “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750) ”is the most famous. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly oer the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me.