Love and Death: ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ by Thomas Gray

Video Description

Situated on the cusp of the Romantic era, Thomas Gray’s work is a mixture of impersonal Augustan abstraction and intense subjectivity. ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ is one of the most famous poems in the English language, and continues to exert its influence on contemporary poetry. Mark and Seamus explore three of Gray’s elegiac poems and their peculiar emotional power. They discuss Gray’s ambiguous sexuality, his procrastination and class anxieties, and where his humour shines through – as in his elegy for Horace Walpole’s cat. This is an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecryt In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsyt Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v23/n24/john-mullan/unpranked-lyre Tony Harrison: ‘V.’ https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v07/n01/tony-harrison/v Get the books: https://lrb.me/crbooklist Read the texts online: https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/sorw https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/elcc https://www.thomasgray.org/texts/poems/odfc ABOUT CLOSE READINGS Close Readings is a multi-series podcast subscription from the London Review of Books which looks at different periods and themes in literature through selections of key texts, covering poetry, fiction, history and philosophy from Ancient Greece to the present day. Find more episodes here: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLT6dL0t3N1uwntdebUCvXl_JD7K9J8B0K Subscribe: https://lrb.me/closereadingsyt LRB AUDIOBOOKS Discover audiobooks from the LRB, including Jonathan Rée's Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre: https://lrb.me/audiobookscip ABOUT THE LRB The LRB is Europe’s leading magazine of books and ideas. Published twice a month, it provides a space for some of the world’s best writers to explore a wide variety of subjects in exhilarating detail – from culture and politics to science and technology via history and philosophy. In the age of the long read, the LRB remains the pre-eminent exponent of the intellectual essay, admired around the world for its fearlessness, its range and its elegance. As well as essays and book reviews each issue also contains poems, an exhibition review, ‘short cuts’, letters and a diary, and is available in print, online, and offline via our app. Subscribers enjoy unlimited access to almost 15,000 articles in our digital archive. Our website features a regular blog and a channel of audio and video content, including podcasts, author interviews and highlights from the events programme at the London Review Bookshop.