James Metcalf

My research interrogates the role of the churchyard as a vital space for poetry in the long eighteenth century. In my thesis I reappraise the conventional category of ‘graveyard poetry’ by replacing the ‘graveyard school’ with churchyard literature. The substitution of churchyard for graveyard follows the texts themselves: the churchyard is announced as the environment in and about which poems were written, and there is a long history of readers connecting these literary landscapes to real places. The churchyard is also a particular location with its own history and culture, in place of the generic term for a burial site. Through historical research and theoretical reflection, the churchyard emerges in my thesis as a centre of civilisation and identity for communities of the living and the dead, up to and including the eighteenth century; for writers of this later time it was also a landscape with a distinct poetics.

The thesis reflects on eighteenth-century occupations of the churchyard as the locus of a death-centred poetics of contemplation. The layered etymology of ‘contemplation’ grounds the meditative activity of poet-narrators in a conducive space, and the thesis considers what it means to 'dwell' in a contemplative landscape: writing thoughtfully and solemnly about (and in) landscape; imaginatively inhabiting landscape; creating an imaginative landscape. The place and role of the dead in this landscape is also a central theme, as they afford opportunities to reflect on the relationship between environments and human history and culture.

Divided into author-centred chapters, this thesis reconsiders works by Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young, and Thomas Gray, challenging critical misreadings of the mid eighteenth century and engaging with persistent taxonomies such as ‘pre-Romanticism’ by returning to the topography inhabited by the poems and attending to their contemporary reception and significance. It also reveals a continuity of poetic preoccupation with the churchyard by including traditionally ‘Romantic’ writers such as Charlotte Smith and William Wordsworth as they adopt and revise its history, culture, and poetics.