ABSTRACT
Rise of English Romanticism (1929), which tackles the problem of taxonomy and influence head-on, that the term “graveyard poetry” achieves critical consensus.4
All of these taxonomic configurations rest upon differing sources of influence, but they are not necessarily incompatible. Indeed, it is most productive to view eighteenth-century graveyard poetry as the culmination of a number of literary precedents. Milton’s Il Penseroso certainly provides a template for nocturnal commune with “divinest Melancholy” in the “dim religious light” of cloistered meditation.5 Shakespeare also provides useful source material for the graveyard poets, particularly, of course, in Hamlet.6 Echoes of the Prince of Denmark’s famous soliloquy of existential despair can be found in examples:
To be, or not to be – that is the question: Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune, Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, And by opposing end them? To die, to sleep – … To sleep, perchance to dream. Ay, there’s the rub; For in that sleep of death what dreams may come, When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, Must give us pause.7
