Gray, Thomas 1716-71
English poet

Born in London, he was educated at Eton and Peterhouse, Cambridge. At Eton he met Horace Walpole, whom he accompanied (1739) on a two-and-a-half-year tour of France and Italy, but they quarrelled at Reggio and parted. Gray returned to England and in 1742 he wrote his 'Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College' (1747), and began the 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard' (1751), in Stoke Poges, Buckinghamshire. He then went back to Cambridge, where he wrote his Pindaric Odes (1757). He declined the laureateship in 1757. In 1768 he collected his poems in the first general edition, and became Professor of History and Modern Languages at Cambridge.

Bibliography: R Cremer, Thomas Gray, a biography (1955)