id author title date pages extension mime words sentences flesch summary cache txt en-wikipedia-org-2506 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard - Wikipedia .html text/html 13488 1000 75 Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751.[1] The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742. This is compounded further by the narrator trying to avoid an emotional response to death, by relying on rhetorical questions and discussing what his surroundings lack.[28] Nevertheless, the sense of kinship with Robert Blair's "The Grave" was so generally recognised that Gray's Elegy was added to several editions of Blair's poem between 1761 and 1808, after which other works began to be included as well.[29] ./cache/en-wikipedia-org-2506.html ./txt/en-wikipedia-org-2506.txt