graveyard poetry

graveyard poetry, the term applied to a minor but influential 18th‐century tradition of meditative poems on mortality and immortality, often set in graveyards. The so‐called ‘graveyard school’ of poets in England and Scotland was not in fact an organized group. The best‐known examples of this melancholic kind of verse are ‘A Night‐Piece on Death’ (1721) by the Irish poet Thomas Parnell, Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742–6), the Scottish clergyman Robert Blair's The Grave (1743), and the culmination of this tradition in English, Thomas Gray's ‘Elegy written in a Country Churchyard’ (1751; usually called ‘Gray's Elegy’). These works had many imitators in Europe, and constitute a significant current of preromanticism.