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
Paris: A Poem a nursery game. It does not belong to the art of poetry." Contemporary critics have noted that "Paris" uses techniques that anticipate important modernist works. Like Virginia Woolf's Mrs Dalloway and James Joyce's Ulysses, the poem depicts a single day in a modern city and explores the unconscious. With its fragmented voices and inclusion of notes written by the author, it also anticipates The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot. Parmar speculates that because Eliot also published his poetry with Hogarth Press, he likely knew that "Paris" existed and may have even read it before writing "The Waste Land". Paris: