Graveyard school: - Graveyard school, genre of 18th-century British poetry that focused on death and bereavement. - These poems express the sorrow and pain of bereavement, evoke the horror of death’s physical manifestations, and suggest the transitory nature of human life. - The graveyard poets, also known as the Churchyard Poets were a group of writers in England during the 18th century. Their writing was characterized by meditations on death and the afterlife. - Thomas Gray’s “An Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard” (1751) is such a poem that belongs to this category. - The poem is a dignified, gently melancholy elegy celebrating the graves of humble and unknown villagers and suggesting that the lives of rich and poor alike “lead but to the grave.”
• Thomas Gray is famous for Graveyard Poet. • His famous elegy is 'Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard'. • His famous quotations: - Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air. (An Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard) - Where ignorance is bliss, it is folly to be wise. - The paths of glory lead but to grave.
Source: An ABC of English Literature, Dr. M Mofizar Rahman and Lecture.