In English literature the earliest evidence of this cultural shift can be seen in the poetry of Thomas Gray and the Graveyard poets.

Thomas Gray’s (1716-1771)

Thomas Gray was born in London to a prosperous middle-class family. Educated first in Eton he went on to Cambridge where he became friend with Horace Walpole, the son of Prime Minister. He travelled around Europe in 1739-1741. Soon after his return to England< Gray’s father and then his close friend Richard West died. Gray returned to live with his mother for a short time in a small village Stoke Poges. While there he wrote The Sonnet on the Death of Richard West, Ode on Adversity and the unfinished Hymn to Ignorance. After this period of reclusion he returned to Cambridge. He graduated in Law in 1743. He was then appointed Professor of Modern History at Cambridge. He died in 1771.

Gray was by inclination and cultivation withdrawn and melancholic. His fines verse reflects a taste for mediation rather than action. Thomas Gray’s reputation rests upon a handful of poems written in the middle years of the century. Elegy Written in a country Graveyard is generally considered to be his masterpiece.

Elegy a poem in which the speaker laments оплакивать death of a particular person or the loss of something he valued.

It was published in 1751. In it the poet walks around the graveyard reflecting on the mortality of the villagers who are buried there. In the final lines the poet considers his own death and composes his epitaph. The poem is sentimental, melancholic in nature. It’s introspective. It marked a clear shift from classical style and foreshadowed the Romantic period.

Little material was to follow his great poetic masterpiece. In 1753 he published a small collection of 6 poems and later his two Pindaric odes (пиндарические стихи, оды (в стиле древнегреческого поэта Пиндара), The Bard (1757) and Progress of Poesy (1754). They offer both a tribute to Greek poetic form and an experimental interest in new kind of subject. Gray’s Odes reveal a lyric poet experimenting both with an elevated mood and a weighty historical moral. The Progress of Poesy traces patriotic genealogy for English verse. The author depicts the history of verse tradition that moves from Greece and Rome to England.

He then started doing research for a history of English poetry which he intended to write. He also travelled around Scotland and England. This travelling revealed his great interest in ancient Celtic and Norse poetry and his love of nature. In 1768 he published Poems which included his imitations of Celtic and Norse verse, such as The Fatal Sisters and The Descent of Odin (1761). Gray boldly attempts to interfuse a Celtic tradition and an English inheritance within a classical framework.

Gray’s work inspired a group of poets known as Graveyard poets. Like Gray they found inspiration in graveyard and wrote on the theme of mortality. They emphasized the subjects of death, and bereavement тяжёлая утрата in their writings. While reveling in the images of death and the grave, the poets in the Graveyard school sought to describe death in a way such that the reader would gain an appreciation of death as a transitional phase. They also introduce detailed imagery evoking the grave and the tomb, and lay stress on subjective experience, often incorporating personal material from the poet's own life. In their emphasis on the personal and individual, the Graveyard poets are often viewed as precursors of Romanticism. In addition, the Graveyard school, with its depictions of graves, churchyards, night, death, and ghosts, has been seen as laying the groundwork for Gothic literature. The so‐called ‘graveyard school’ of poets in England and Scotland was not in fact an organized group. The best‐known examples of this melancholic kind of verse are ‘A Night‐Piece on Death’ (1721) by the Irish poet Thomas Parnell, Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–6), the Scottish clergyman Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), and the culmination of this tradition in English, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy 6. Drama

At the end of the 17^th century middle and low classes lived by a strict puritan moral code, and considered theater going to be immoral, so drama became a form of entertainment for the upper classes. As the Court had been in France during the greater part of the Protectorate all of them were familiar with Paris and its fashions. Thus it was natural, upon the return of the court, that French influence should be felt, particularly in the theater. The French influence can be seen in a new type of drama called heroic tragedy. Heroic tragedies:

• Tried to emulate epic poetry

• Were mainly about love and valour; the main character was generally a hero whose passionate love conflicted with the demands of honour and his patriotic duty

• Were written in rhyming couplets and in an elevated style, both of which made the language extremely artificial.

Dryden’s All for Love is a good example of this type of drama.

A new type of play, called the Comedy of Manners appeared at the end of 17^th century.

The main features of the Comedy of Manner can be summed up as following: