Graveyard Poets

At first thought, this seems an unlikely area to find fine poetry. The Graveyard Poets, also known as Churchyard Poets or the Boneyard Boys, began in pre-Romantic days with a leaning towards gloom, melancholy and the general decay of churchyards. It should be remembered that in the 18th century some city graveyards were a teeming mass of overcrowding and disease, their country brethren better housed but hardly idylls of worship. What would eventually lead to the Gothic literary genre began in the main with reflections by Christian clergymen upon God, mortality, and the assumed afterlife. And in their musings are classics from such talented poets as the immense Thomas Grey, Thomas Parnell, James Thompson and Edward Young, together with many others who elevate words from a perhaps murky underworld to examples of poetic beauty which few can rival.