But the "Magazine"
named Gray as the author, and success without anonymity was the fate
of the "Elegy." Edition followed edition, and the poem was almost from
birth an international classic.
One of the author's prescriptions for publication concerned the verse
form. He told Walpole that Dodsley must "print it without any Interval
between the Stanza's, because the Sense is in some Places continued
beyond them." In the Egerton MS Gray had written the poem with no
breaks to set off quatrains, but in the earlier MS (Eton College),
where the poem is entitled, "Stanza's, wrote in a Country
Church-Yard," the quatrains are spaced in normal fashion. The
injunction shows Gray's sensitiveness as to metrical form. He had
called the poem an Elegy only after urging by Mason, and he possibly
doubted if his metre was "soft" enough for true elegy. The metre
hitherto had not been common in elegies, though James Hammond's "Love
Elegies" (1743) had used it and won acclaim. But the heroic
(hendecasyllabic) quatrain was regarded in general as too lofty,
stately, cool, for elegy.
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