Poetic Meditations on Death : A Gothic and Romantic Literary Genre of the Long Eighteenth Century (1693-1858)

This anthology of graveyard poetry is designed to make available to students of English language literature this once popular but now rather obscure genre of eighteenth-century verse. It contains foundational graveyard poems, innovative and original variations, notable and frivolous imitations, and several odd and noteworthy transformations by British and American poets. This work is aimed at students of English and American literature. It brings together in one volume, for the first time, some of the most popular and nfluential religious and spiritually contemplative poems of the mid-eighteenth century, as well as notable and original imitations and adaptations. The anthology illustrates that the genre of graveyard poetry was a transatlantic phenomenon that lasted well into the nineteenth century, to which both popular and serious poets - even a poet laureate - contributed. The diverse selection of poems emphasizes the genre's religious roots, but equally shows how the later eighteenth-century fashion for sentimental melancholy, aesthetic development in Romanticism, and the popular gothic craze helped transform and prolong the genre's popular appeal.