 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 . " 
