Thomas Gray (1716–1771) was born in London to middle-class parents. Educated at Eton and later at Cambridge, he left the university without a degree to travel in Europe. Gray returned to Cambridge in 1742, where he began to write poetry, his first odes publishing in 1747.

Gray did not produce a great volume of verse, but he wrote carefully, bringing each poem to a level of perfection rarely achieved before or since. Characteristics that distinguish Gray's verse include a unique sensitivity to landscape and a strain of melancholy that shows him to have had a dignified, tragic view of life. Some contemporaries criticized Gray's frequent use of inverted sentences. However, Gray countered that "the language of the age is never the language of poetry." Continuing to write poetry through 1769, he lived the life of a scholar, traveling and devoting himself to the study of pre-Elizabethan poetry and Old Norse and Welsh literature.