Graveyard Poetry and the Aesthetics of Horror

Eighteenth-century graveyard poetry has recently gained increasing attention as an important precursor to gothic fiction. Although critical consensus suggests that graveyard poetry’s objectives of religious and moral reform are distinguished from the gothic pursuit of pleasurable frisson, a case can be made for reading graveyard poetry as an example of—rather than merely antecedent to—gothic literature. Accordingly, this chapter presents a reading of Robert Blair’s The Grave (1743) as an example of gothic horror, exposing an elaborate set of aesthetics and literary techniques that anticipates late-century critical definitions of horror, and novels such as Matthew Lewis’ The Monk (1796).