For the answer to the question above, Thomas Gray has sometimes been classified as a pre-romantic writer
Gray’s Pre-Romanticism is clearly shown in his poem Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard. He is known as Pre-Romantic due to his touch on three romantic aspects. The first is his concern with the common people.
The poem itself is an elegy in name but not in form; it employs a style similar to that of contemporary odes, but it embodies a meditation on death, and remembrance after death. The poem argues that the remembrance can be good and bad, and the narrator finds comfort in pondering the lives of the obscure rustics buried in the churchyard.
