Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard nearing, Gray questioned if his own life would enter into a sort of rebirth cycle or, should he die, if there would be anyone to remember him. Gray's meditations during spring 1750 turned to how individuals' reputations would survive. Eventually, Gray remembered some lines of poetry that he composed in 1742 following the death of West, a poet he knew. Using that previous material, he began to compose a poem that would serve as an answer to the various questions he was pondering. On 3 June 1750, Gray moved to Stoke Poges, and on 12 June he completed "Elegy Written
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard start of that war. It was then taken up in the unrelated Humphrey Cobb's 1935 anti-war novel, although in this case the name was suggested for the untitled manuscript in a competition held by the publisher. His book also served in its turn as the basis for Stanley Kubrick’s film Paths of Glory, released in 1957. This example is just one more among many illustrating the imaginative currency that certain lines of the poem continue to have, over and above their original significance. Since the poem is long, there have been few musical settings. Musicians during the 1780s adopted the