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O poezji cmentarnej (graveyard poetry) – Robert Blair i Edward Young

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Kasperski E.

Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

2012

issue 2(5)

179-198

The term ‘graveyard poetry’ or Graveyard School of Poetry is used in the history of literature to refer to a collection of English poems of the 18th century whose character is primarily meditative and refl exive. The graveyard poets chose intensely emotional lyric genres such as dramatised and full of strong emotions meditative monologue, elegy or last will. They allowed the authors to express deeply subjective and intimate feelings, which revealed the supressed and hidden in the social discourse unoffi cial aspect of their psyche. They led to poetry which is direct, personal, confessional, intimate and reaching out of the rigour of Neoclassical convention. The compositions refl ected on mortality and immortality, passing of time, fragility of human life, horror of death, interment, grave, ‘coffi n bed’ after death, symbolism of the dead, decomposing bodies and bleak cemetery night and silence. They were full of sorrow, lugubriousness, grievance, dispair and melancholy caused by irreparable loss of a close person who passed away. They asked dramatic questions about the sense of life and death, about the meaning of the symbolism of graves for the living and the postmortem ‘what’s next’. The graveyard poetry literary and artistically wise ennobled and canonised the motif of grave and cemetery, which changed into meaningful and symbolic scenery. The Graveyard School of Poetry might have appeared to be a reaction to modern and scientifi c conversion of the world and universe image and therefore might have seemed to be a regressive and nostalgic turn towards Middle Ages and Baroque. In fact, it was paving the way for the future as well as for the romantic, radical revaluation and changes in literature, especially through opening towards subjective, extreme emotions of an individual, striving for direct poetic form of expression and by virtue of concentrating on boundary existential refl ection. The history of literature features above others the names of two poets who were the fi rst to compose poems initiating the graveyard poetry movement as a collective historical-literary phenomenon and infl uencing the successors – a Scottish poet, Robert Blair, the author of The Grave and Edward Young, the author of The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality.

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1 Prace Filologiczne. Literaturoznawstwo

1 Kasperski E.

1 2012

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O poezji cmentarnej (graveyard poetry) – Robert Blair i Edward Young