Among literary critics, the remarkable success of Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is perhaps nearly as well known as the poem itself. By 1753, a commentator in the Monthly Review could conclude that “to enlarge in his praise, would be impertinence; as his church-yard elegy is in every one’s hands, and not more justly than universally admired.” Nearly three decades later, Samuel Johnson, despite his well known distaste for Gray’s other poems, famously rejoiced to concur with the firmly established judgment of the “common reader”: “the Church-yard,” he observed, “abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.” The macabre matter and tone of Gray’s poem was hardly new, but rather a variant of the poetic meditations on death that were in vogue by the mid-century, and the favourable reception of the Elegy was perhaps due partly to the “affecting and pensive cast of the subject, just like Hervey’s Meditations on the Tombs.” Yet, as Johnson’s evaluation suggests, the poem’s remarkably powerful and broad appeal during the eighteenth century was due significantly to its distinctive engagement with contemporary experience and sentiments. The Elegy was widely accessible – it seemed already familiar to its early readers, as Johnson alleges – because it evoked the inequitable education system that underpinned the institutionalized cultural inequalities it examines; the Elegy is, in part, about the situation of literacy education in contemporary England. Marking the limits of literacy both within and without the poem, the Elegy figures the cultural silence of the rural villagers as a function of the arrangement of institutions of aural power. It is the situation of the poetic environment, markedly removed from those institutions capable of producing sound, that effectively silences the uncouth peasants. This institutionalized inequality is written into the poem’s linguistic engagement with classical literacy, which served throughout the eighteenth century as a distinctive sign of a superior education. Rather than seamlessly translate the classical tradition for an English readership, making immediately accessible the cultural capital of an elite education, the Elegy appropriately marks the irreducible distance of its original classical sources. Gray dismissively imputed the popularity of his poem “entirely to the subject,” but among the tide of similar contemporary reflections on death the Elegy stands out because it subsumes the conventional treatment of death to an interrogation of the socio-economic determinants of public recognition. Certainly, the speaker memorably reiterates the traditional topos that “the paths of glory lead but to the grave.” Yet, as Henry Weinfield suggests, in the Elegy this familiar motif functions primarily to rebuke the proud; regardless of the metaphysical implications of mortality, the poem itself attends far more to the activities and concerns of the living than to the end they share. As one contemporary observed in 1762, dismissing Gray’s train of imitators, the Elegy distinctly pretermits the traditional imagery of mortality employed by other poets, who present but “another Gentleman in black, with the same funeral face, and mournful ditty, with the same cypress in his hand, and affected sentence in his mouth, viz. that we all must die!” Eschewing such a conventional treatment of death, the Elegy considerably minimizes the physical and spiritual aspects of mortality, defining death largely by the more abstract limitations it imposes on political and artistic development; death functions, in the poem, to curtail the development of the rural peasants, as it does that of the youth, whose eloquence and melancholic temperament attest to the artistic and social potential that has ostensibly been prevented by his unexpected passing. The mouldering proper …