This study focuses on the poetic temperament of Thomas Gray and considers his Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as representative of a change in sensibility which took place roughly in the last half of the eighteenth century. The first chapter considers the literary and biographical influences on the author's changing aesthetic sensibility. The second chapter concerns the early life and education of Gray and his friendship with Walpole and West. The third chapter is a study of the Elegy itself and how it represents the poetic and aesthetic ideas of the author and the age in which he lived. In the concluding chapter Gray is considered as a transitional figure whose work embodies unresolved tensions between the Neoclassic and the Romantic.