Arthur Quiller-Couch, ed. 1919. The Oxford Book of English Verse: 1250–1900. ... THE Curfew tolls the knell of parting day, ... The place of fame and elegy supply:

Original text: Thomas Gray, An Elegy Wrote in a Country Church Yard, 1751; and The Eton College Manuscript (Los Angeles, CA: William Andrews Clark Memorial Library, 1951). PR 3502 E5 1751a.

Article date: January 1, 2007 ... This, of course, is what is entailed by the topoi we label with the tags culled from ... Topos seekers are perhaps like the biological taxonomists called cladists,

Thomas Gray, 1750 ... Milton's Il Penseroso, another meditation-piece written about 120 years before Gray's Elegy, begins "Hence, vain deluding Joys"; its convention is of a man speaking;

Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die.

--Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" ... Which is what makes the Thomas Gray lit so profound. It is a favorite passage of John Wooden. And who better than him to put the game

Few poems have been as well received on their initial publication, and so rapidly assimilated into the canon, as Gray's Elegy.

At the very end of his life of Thomas Gray, Samuel Johnson writes:In the character of his Elegy I rejoice to concur with the common reader;

Their name, their years, spelt by th' unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply: And many a holy text around she strews, ... Read more poems by Thomas Gray: Thomas Gray Poems at Poetry X.

London: Adam and Charles Black, (1914). Gray's Elegy has been published many times and been illustrated by many fine hands.