ABSTRACT
The British Romantic era, roughly 1770 to 1830, with its characteristic emotional excess and fascination with the arcane, is conventionally associated with the rise of the gothic. By the end of the eighteenth century, the gothic was so ubiquitous in British writing that Ann Radcliffe identified two sub-types: a high gothic of terror characterised by suspense and the sublime, and a debased mode of horror associated with voyeurism, shock, and disgust. As David Punter suggests, even though verse is not the best medium for a slow escalation of terror, even here gothic elements are common, from the mid-century trend of graveyard verse to the Romanticera fascination with repurposed tales of antique times, such as Letitia Elizabeth Landon’s dark versification of a female serpent legend, “The Fairy of the Fountains” (1835) (210).
