Thomas Gray

Thomas Gray worked on his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" for the better part of a decade before publishing it in 1751. Set among the graves at Stoke Poges, it honors the unremembered poor — the "mute inglorious Miltons" — and became an immediate sensation, pirated within days.

Few poems have given English so many permanent phrases: "far from the madding crowd," "the paths of glory lead but to the grave." General Wolfe is said to have recited it before the assault on Quebec, declaring he would rather have written it than take the city.

Gray himself was a shy Cambridge scholar who published barely a dozen poems and quietly declined the Poet Laureateship.