living language." Modern critics emphasised the poem's use of language as a reason for its importance and popularity. In 1995, Lorna Clymer argued, "The dizzying series of displacements and substitutions of subjects, always considered a crux in Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751), results from a complex manipulation of epitaphic rhetoric." Later, Robert Mack, in 2000, explained that "Gray's Elegy is numbered high among the very greatest poems in the English tradition precisely because of its simultaneous accessibility and inscrutability." He went on to claim that the poem "was very soon to transform his life – and to transform or at least profoundly affect the development of lyric poetry in English". While analyzing the use of "death" in 18th-century poetry, David Morris, in 2001, declared the poem as "a monument in this ongoing transformation of death" and that "the poem in its quiet portraits of rural life succeeds in drawing the forgotten dead back into the community of the living." References Bibliography (Trans. W. D. MacInnes and Louis Cazamian) Garrison, James D., A Dangerous Liberty: Translating Gray's Elegy, University of Delaware 2009 Gibson, John, with Peter Wilkinson, and Stephen Freeth (eds), Thomas Gray: Elegy in a Country Church Yard, Latin Translations, 1762–2001, (Orpington, 2008) Martin, John (ed.), [https://books.google.com/books?id=ptJIAAAAIAAJ&lpg=PT3&ots=wmMz9czOPp&dq=Gray's%20elegy%20%20%22john%20constable%22&pg=PT3#v=onepage&q=Gray's%20elegy%20%20%22john%20constable%22&f=false Elegy Written in a Country Church-yard]: With Versions in the Greek, Latin, German, Italian, and French Languages (London 1839) ; there is a version online at the Thomas Gray Archive Torri, Alessandro, L'elegia di Tommaso Gray sopra un cimitero di campagna tradotta dall'inglese in più lingue con varie cose finora inedite, Verona 1819 Turk ,Thomas N., "Search and Rescue: An Annotated Checklist of Translations of Gray’s Elegy", Translation and Literature, Edinburgh University 2013, pp. 45–73 External links "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", from The Thomas Gray Archive (University of Oxford) "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", from the Poetry Foundation with discussion on poem. 1751 poems Poetry by Thomas Gray 1750 poems