graveyard school, 18th-century school of English poets who wrote primarily about human mortality. Often t in a graveyard, their poems mud on the vicissitudes of life, the solitude of death and the grave, and the anguish of bereavement. Their air of pensive gloom presaged the melancholy of the Romantic Movement. The most famous graveyard poems were Robert Blair's The Grave(1743), Edward Y oung's nine-volume The Complaint, or Night Thoughts on Life, Death, and Immortality (1742-45), and Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1750).
-----From Columbia Encyclopedia
graveyard school, genre of 18th-century British poetry that focud on death and bereavement. The graveyard school consisted largely of imitations of Robert Blair’s popular long poem of morbid appeal, The Grave(1743), and of Edward Y oung’s celebrated blank-ver dramatic rhapsody Night Thoughts (1742–45). The poems express the sorrow and pain of bereavement, evoke the horror of death’s physical manifestations, and suggest the transitory nature of human life. The meditative, philosophical tendencies of graveyard poetry found their fullest expression in Thomas Gray’s“An Elegy Written in a Country Church Y ard” (1751). The poem is a dignified, gently melancholy elegy celebrating the graves of humble and unknown villagers and suggesting that the lives of rich and poor alike “lead but to the grave.” The works of the graveyard school were significant as early precursors of the Romantic Movem
ent.
