Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray was a Cambridge scholar who spent his life in college rooms, published a dozen poems, refused the laureateship, and wrote the most quoted poem in English. The Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, seven years in the making and published in 1751 to forestall a pirated edition, meditates on the obscure dead of Stoke Poges, the mute inglorious Miltons, and the paths of glory that lead but to the grave. Wolfe is said to have recited it the night before Quebec and said he would rather have written it than take the city. Johnson, who disliked the rest of Gray, granted that the Elegy abounds with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.