 In evoking the English countryside , the poem belongs to the picturesque tradition found in John Dyer 's <unk> Hill ( 1726 ) , and the long line of topographical imitations it inspired . However , it diverges from this tradition in focusing on the death of a poet . Much of the poem deals with questions that were linked to Gray 's own life ; during the poem 's composition , he was confronted with the death of others and questioned his own mortality . Although universal in its statements on life and death , the poem was grounded in Gray 's feelings about his own life , and served as an epitaph for himself . As such , it falls within an old poetic tradition of poets contemplating their legacy . The poem , as an elegy , also serves to lament the death of others , including West , though at a remove . This is not to say that Gray 's poem was like others of the graveyard school of poetry ; instead , Gray tried to avoid a description that would evoke the horror common to other poems in the elegiac tradition . This is compounded further by the narrator trying to avoid an emotional response to death , by relying on rhetorical questions and discussing what his surroundings lack . Nevertheless , the sense of kinship with Robert Blair 's " The Grave " was so generally recognised that Gray 's Elegy was added to several editions of Blair 's poem between 1761 @-@ 1808 , after which other works began to be included as well . 
