In 1751, a little-known Cambridge academic called Thomas Gray published “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” and became a household name. His poem was a funeral elegy about the sun going down over the graves of long-forgotten people whom Gray didn’t know. They happened to be buried in the same small country churchyard as his aunt and mother (and, eventually, himself), in the village of Stoke Poges. It was an instant smash, topping the literary charts and going into multiple reprints, editions, and translations - and spawning a minor sub-industry of satires and parodies.

If you’ve ever heard of the “graveyard school” of poetry, Thomas Gray is its genius, and “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by far its most famous and influential poem.

Gray had a huge impact on the Romantic poets - Wordsworth, Colerdige, Keats and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Tennyson, Browning, T.S. Eliot and Philip Larkin were all indebted to him – and countless others.

Generations of British schoolchildren know Gray’s poem by heart, so today Sophie and Jonty are digging up the dirt on this graveyard poem to ask what all the fuss is about. Why is this one of the most important and prized works in English poetry, and which heavy-hitter authors came before Gray, paving the way for this poetic game-changer?

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A special collaboration between Sophie and the celebrated writer and podcaster Gretchen Rubin, of Happier with Gretchen Rubin, recorded live from New York City. Join Sophie and Gretchen on a literary pilgrimage to the Upper East Side of New York, where they celebrate a shared favourite children's book, From the Mixed Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, by the extraordinary E.L Konigsburg.

Sophie and Gretchen walk out on the streets of Manhattan and through the galleries of the Met, visiting favorite landmarks from the novel, and discussing what makes this children's book so perfect, both a glorious product of its time and place, and an immortalizing of the Met and New York City for future generations of children and their parents.

It's part of a series Gretchen and her sister are doing called MOVE 26 in '26, to get readers and listeners exercising for at least 26 minutes a day, during 2026!

Check it out here, and sign up:

https://gretchenrubin.com/move26in26/

And learn more about Gretchen and her work on a happier life here:

https://gretchenrubin.com/

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Or join our Patreon community here: https://www.patreon.com/c/secretlifeofbookspodcast

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Talent shows like The X Factor, Got Talent and their many spin offs began in the 1380s, not the 1980s! They were invented by Geoffrey Chaucer, who wrote his masterpiece The Canterbury Tales at the end of a successful and glamorous diplomatic career in medieval Europe.

This is the literary pilgrimage to top all literary pilgrimages, the imagined story of a group of medieval odds and sods, who meet up to in a London pub and walk to Canterbury Cathedral. The owner of the pub, a local MP named Harry Bailey (a real guy), decides that they’ll have a storytelling competition to pass the time while they travel. The winner will get dinner at, you guessed it, Harry's pub.

No one had ever written anything remotely like this before, and Chaucer’s version of pub-mike night became a literary sensation.

The Canterbury Tales is one of the most famous works of English Literature ever, and a perennial favorite on "Intro to English Lit" syllabuses. It's written in Middle English, which isn't an easy read now, but has a lot of fascinating local color that has disappeared from modern English. In the first installment of our “Long(ish) Poems” series, Sophie and Jonty explain why the Canterbury Tales remains an evergreen literary staple, what makes Chaucer’s characters so brilliant, and what’s important about the "General Prologue" that kick-starts the whole tale cycle. [Editor's note: work on your titles, Geoffrey!]

Here is Harvard's easy to use version of the Canterbury Tales in Middle English with a modern English translation: https://chaucer.fas.harvard.edu/pages/general-prologue-0

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