116 watercolors illustrate 13 best-loved poems by Thomas Gray, including "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and "Ode on the Death of a Favourite Cat." First inexpensive full-color reproduction, with complete text of poems.

Thomas Gray was born on 26 December 1716 in Cornhill in London. His father was a scrivener and his mother a milliner. He was the fifth of twelve children and the only one to survive. With his father becoming mentally unwell and abusing his wife she left with Thomas in tow for a safer life. Thomas was sent to Eton, where two of his uncles worked, and although he was a delicate and scholarly child with an aversion to sports he found it suited him. Whilst there he made three close friends; Horace Walpole, son of the Prime Minister Robert Walpole; Thomas Ashton, and Richard West. The four prided themselves on their style, humour, and appreciation of beauty. They were called the "quadruple alliance." In 1734 Gray went up to Peterhouse, Cambridge. Although his family wished him to study law he spent most of his time reading classical and modern literature, and playing Vivaldi and Scarlatti on the harpsichord for relaxation. In 1738 he accompanied his old school-friend Walpole on his Grand Tour of Europe. It was Walpole who later helped publish Gray's poetry. Gray began to seriously write poems in 1742, mainly after his close friend Richard West died. He moved to Cambridge and began a programme of literary study. Gray was a brilliant bookworm, a quiet, abstracted, dreaming scholar. He became a Fellow first of Peterhouse, and later of Pembroke College where he had moved after the students at Peterhouse played a prank on him. It is thought that Gray began writing his masterpiece, the Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, in the graveyard of St Giles parish church in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire, in 1742. After several years of leaving it unfinished, he completed it in 1750. When Gray sent it to Walpole, Walpole sent off the poem as a manuscript and it appeared in many magazines. Gray then published the poem himself and received the credit he was due. The poem was a literary sensation. Its reflective, calm and stoic tone was greatly admired, and despite the piracy it was imitated, quoted and translated into Latin and Greek. Gray spent most of his life as a scholar in Cambridge, and only travelled again later in life. Although he wrote little he is regarded by some as the foremost English-language poet of the mid-18th century. In 1757, he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, which he refused. Gray was extremely self-critical and feared failure. He once wrote that he feared his collected works would be "mistaken for the works of a flea." Gray came to be known as one of the "Graveyard poets" of the late 18th century, along with Oliver Goldsmith, William Cowper, and Christopher Smart. Gray perhaps knew these men, sharing ideas about death, mortality, and the finality of death. In 1768, after the death of Lawrence Brockett the Regius chair of Modern History at Cambridge, a sinecure which carried a salary of 400, fell vacant and Gray secured the position. Thomas Gray died on 30 July 1771 in Cambridge, and was buried beside his mother in the churchyard of Stoke Poges, the setting for his famous Elegy.

Mack incorporates recent scholarship on Gray, drawing on developments in 18th-century and gender studies, as well as on extensive archival research into the life of the poet and his family. The result is an eloquent and enlightening book, sure to be the definitive biography of this great poet, a forefather of the Romantic Movement. 50 illustrations.

"This work postulates that the set of 116 designs by William Blake, illustrated herein, is not a series of individual responses to the pieces of text they accompany, nor is it a series of responses to the individual poems of Thomas Gray. The designs are also more than illustrations, or corrections, of Gray's speakers or of Gray himself. In the Gray designs, Blake was using the opportunity given him by John and Ann Flaxman in 1797 to explore and explain visually the reformist malaise in the reactionary nineties when the general economic well-being and optimism had been replaced by the effects of war and fear. For Blake, the collapse into the later 1790s is the failure of the imaginative will to sustain the impetus that the American and French Revolutions had begun." "Blake saw several causes for this failure of will and created a set of designs rich in allusions and dense with visual conventions. These visual topoi are personal, topical, classical, biblical, and literary." "Thus, there is a need for a study of the Gray designs that sees them as they are: a unity rich with visual conventions partaking of Blake's revolutionary pattern of development and desire to reshape in specific ways the mind of his audience."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

The English countryside has inspired some of the most exquisite and well-loved poetry ever composed in the language. This selection of verse includes, among others, Thomas Gray's reflective and moving meditation on mortality, 'Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard', the soaring beauty of Wordsworth's lines on Tintern Abbey and Keats's ode to Autumn, the deceptively simple words of Emily Brontë and the personal and evocative verse of Thomas Hardy, bringing together the greatest riches of English poetry. Generations of inhabitants have helped shape the English countryside - but it has profoundly shaped us too.It has provoked a huge variety of responses from artists, writers, musicians and people who live and work on the land - as well as those who are travelling through it.English Journeys celebrates this long tradition with a series of twenty books on all aspects of the countryside, from stargazey pie and country churches, to man's relationship with nature and songs celebrating the patterns of the countryside (as well as ghosts and love-struck soldiers).