Graveyard poets

The "Graveyard Poets", also termed “Churchyard Poets” or "the Boneyard Boys” were a number of pre-Romantic English poets of the 18th century characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, 'skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms' elicited by the presence of the graveyard. Moving beyond the elegy lamenting a single death, their purpose was rarely sensationalist. As the century progressed, "graveyard" poetry increasingly expressed a feeling for the 'sublime' and uncanny, and an antiquarian interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry. The "graveyard poets" are often recognized as precursors of the Gothic literary genre, as well as the Romantic movement.

Overview

The Graveyard School is an indefinite literary grouping that binds together a wide variety of authors; what makes a poem a "graveyard" poem remains open to critical dispute. At its narrowest the term "Graveyard School" refers to four poems: Thomas Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, Thomas Parnell's "Night-Piece On Death", Robert Blair's The Grave (poem), and Edward Young's Night-Thoughts. At its broadest it can describe a host of poetry and prose works popular in the early and mid-eighteenth century. The term itself was not used as a brand for the poets and their poetry until William Macneile Dixon did so in 1898.