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

An episode of [Close Readings](https://invisiblenetwork.ai/podcast/1669485143), 17 Mar 2025, 16 min.

Audio: https://www.podtrac.com/pts/redirect.mp3/traffic.megaphone.fm/LRB4109157170.mp3?updated=1750261512

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. Non-subscribers will only hear an extract from this episode. To listen to the full episode, and to all our other Close Readings series, subscribe: Directly in Apple Podcasts: https://lrb.me/applecrld In other podcast apps: https://lrb.me/closereadingsld Further reading in the LRB: John Mullan: Unpranked Lyre https://lrb.me/ldgray1 Tony Harrison: ‘V.’ https://lrb.me/ldgray2 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 LRB Audiobooks Discover audiobooks from the LRB: https://lrb.me/audiobooksld Get in touch: podcasts@lrb.co.uk Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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