Thomas Gray

The poet and literary scholar Thomas Gray attended Eton College and then Cambridge University, where he was said to have found the curriculum dull. After graduation, Gray completed a continental tour of Europe with visits to Paris, Florence, Bologna, and Venice. He then returned to Cambridge where he began a self-imposed program of literary study. He spent the majority of his adult life as a literary scholar in Cambridge. He wrote some of the most celebrate, poems in the English language, including Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, published in 1751. Though he was offered the post of Poet Laureate, he refused it.