Are you an EPFL student looking for a semester project?
Work with us on data science and visualisation projects, and deploy your project as an app on top of GraphSearch.
Concept
Obituary poetry
Summary
Obituary poetry, in the broad sense, includes poems or elegies that commemorate a person's or group of people's deaths.
In its stricter sense, though, it refers to a genre of popular verse or folk poetry that had its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States of America. The genre consists largely of sentimental narrative verse that tells the story of the demise of its typically named subjects and seeks to console their mourners with descriptions of their happy afterlife. The genre achieved its peak of popularity in the decade of the 1870s. While usually full chiefly of conventional pious sentiments, the obituary poets in one sense continue the program of meditations on death begun by the eighteenth-century graveyard poets, such as Edward Young's Night Thoughts, and as such continue one of the themes that went into literary Romanticism.
Obituary poetry constituted a large portion of the poetry published in American newspapers in the nineteenth century. In 1870, Mark Twain wrote an essay on "Post-mortem Poetry", in which he remarked that:
In Philadelphia they have a custom which it would be pleasant to see adopted throughout the land. It is that of appending to published death-notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry. Any one who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia LEDGER must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes to extinguished worth. In Philadelphia, the departure of a child is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial than by the accustomed solacing poesy in the PUBLIC LEDGER. In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse.
and collected examples, such as the following, occasioned by the death of Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble, aged 4 days.
Our little Sammy's gone,His tiny spirit's fled;Our little boy we loved so dearLies sleeping with the dead.
A tear within a father's eye,A mother's aching heart,Can only tell the agonyHow hard it is to part.
Official source
About this result
This page is automatically generated and may contain information that is not correct, complete, up-to-date, or relevant to your search query. The same applies to every other page on this website. Please make sure to verify the information with EPFL's official sources.