A term applied to eighteenth-century poets who wrote meditative poems, usually set in a graveyard, on the theme of human mortality, in moods which range from elegiac pensiveness to profound gloom.
Examples are Thomas Parnell's "Night-Piece on Death" (1721)
Edward Young's long Night Thoughts (1742)
Robert Blair's "The Grave" (1743).
The vogue resulted in one of the most widely known English poems, Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (1751).
The writing of graveyard poems spread from England to Continental literature in the second part of the century and is represented in America by William Cullen Bryant's "Thanatopsis" (1817).
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