The most authoritative collection of Gray's poetry is the edition first released by Oxford Press in 1966, titled The Complete Poems of Thomas Gray: English, Latin and Greek. The book was edited by H. W. Starr and J. R. Hendrickson, with Starr also penning the introduction.

John Dyer, a Welsh pastoral poet, wrote contemporaneously with Gray. His most notable works, such as "Grongar Hill"—regarded as one of the earliest romantic pastoral poems—are part of the collection Poems, 1761.

Samuel Johnson was the preeminent literary figure during Gray's era. Among his numerous writings is the ten-volume Lives of the Poets, which includes a concise biography of Gray alongside several of Johnson's own poems. Today, he is most famous for the biography written by James Boswell, The Life of Samuel Johnson. This work is considered one of the finest biographies ever written and serves as a crucial resource for understanding the eighteenth-century British literary landscape.

Gray composed his works during the Age of Enlightenment, a period marked by profound intellectual activity worldwide. One of the era's foremost thinkers was the French philosopher René Descartes, who is often credited with humanizing the age's intellectual pursuits. His Discourse on Method and the Meditations remains one of the world's most significant philosophical texts.

Thomas Gray is frequently viewed as a poet ahead of his time, preceding the Romantic Movement that emerged about fifty years later. His reflective style and humanitarian concerns are often likened to the works of William Wordsworth, a pioneer of Romanticism. Wordsworth's "Lines Composed A Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13th, 1798," features a much freer structure compared to Gray's "Elegy," yet both poems share a similar melancholy tone.

Richard Gough's The History of Myddle, written between 1700 and 1706, documents the lives of residents in the small English town of Myddle in Shropshire. This account of rural life offers perhaps the closest insight into the lives of the people depicted in Gray's "Elegy." A 1980 edition of Gough's book, featuring an introduction by Dr. Peter Razzell, is available.