Elegy Written in A Country Churchyard - Influence

Influence

In choosing an "English" feel to the language and setting, Gray provided a model for later poets wishing to describe England and the English countryside. His choice of language, words, and feelings that connected to rural England served as the model for Oliver Goldsmith's and William Cowper's works during the second half of the 18th century. Beyond his own poetry, Goldsmith would play around with the lines of the poem by removing words to alter its meaning. Gray's Elegy was highly influential and provoked a response from the Romantic poets. When William Wordsworth wrote the preface to Lyrical Ballads he responded to Gray's techniques and to the Elegy with his "Intimations of Immortality" ode. As a whole, the Romantics believed that Gray represented the poetic orthodoxy they were rebelling against in that he did not try to overcome death in his poem, but they used Gray's ideas when attempting to define their own beliefs. Gray also influenced how Wordsworth described his education and the death of his father in The Prelude. As a schoolboy, Percy Bysshe Shelley translated part of the Elegy into Latin and visited the churchyard at Stoke Poges. Later, in 1815, when Shelley stayed in Lechlade, he again visited the churchyard, and composed "A Summer Evening Churchyard, Lechlade, Gloucestershire", which echoes the language of Gray.

Gray's influence lasted throughout the Victorian and Modern periods. Alfred, Lord Tennyson, subsequently adopted many features of the Elegy in his poem In Memoriam. He established a ceremonial, almost religious, tone by reusing the idea of the "knell" and "toll" to mark the coming night. This is followed with the poet narrator looking through letters of his deceased friend, echoing Gray's narrator reading the tombstones to connect to the deceased. Robert Browning relied on a similar setting to the Elegy in his pastoral poem "Love Among the Ruins", which describes the desire for glory and how everything ends in death. Unlike Gray, Browning adds a female figure and argues that nothing but love matters. Thomas Hardy memorised Gray's Elegy, he named his fourth novel, Far from the Madding Crowd, after a line of the poem, and it influenced his collection Wessex Poems and Other Verses (1898). Many of Hardy's poems contained a graveyard theme, and he based his poems on Gray's views. In particular, "Friends Beyond" was modelled on the Elegy. Even the frontispiece to the collection contained an image of a graveyard with a reference to the first line of the elegy.

It is possible that parts of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets are derived from Gray's elegy, although Eliot believed that Gray's diction, along with 18th-century poetic diction in general, was restrictive and limited. The Four Quartets covers many of the same views, and Eliot's village is similar to Gray's hamlet. There are many echoes of Gray's language throughout the Four Quartets; both poems rely on the yew tree as an image and use the word "twittering", which was uncommon at the time. Each of Eliot's four poems have parallels to Gray's poem, but "Little Gidding" is deeply indebted to the elegy's meditation on a "neglected spot". Of the similarities between the poems, it is Eliot's reuse of Gray's image of "stillness" that forms the strongest parallel, an image that is essential to the poem's arguments on mortality and society.