Chapter three, Seeking the Daimonic and the Divine, addresses the philosophical and metaphysical concerns held dear by Graveyard poets: representing what lies beyond the grave, trying to describe – and apprehend – the divine, finding divine sources of universal truths, amongst others. Chapter four, The Paths of Glory: Death and Poetic Ambition, is where Parisot identifies the attempts of the Graveyard poets to teach the contemporary reader of the right way to die (‘Mortal, in all thy Acts regard thy End’), but also to elevates pessimism, melancholy and resignation to the status of a sine qua non, a condition necessary for philosophical superiority indicative of superior understanding: consider ‘Then curb each rebel Thought against the Sky/ And die resign’d’ Broome’ from ‘Poem on Death’, 81-3 and ‘He fears Death least, who thinks upon it most’ (Trapp, ‘Death’, 31) (p 106). This, again, is not a particularly new theme in European writing – Florentine Neoplatonists believed that melancholy is the way God chooses special people and communicates to them, and Hamlet was written as the highly attractive embodiment of the condition – but Parisot also identifies the tendency of the Graveyard poets to fetishise suicide – particularly poetic suicide – as the expression of the ultimate personal strength in the face of adversity; as an act to admire, pity and empathise with, rather than to shun and despise. This is a genuine philosophical development, and was certainly not the case earlier in European history. I also enjoyed reading the clever analysis of the complex loop of sentimentality that bound the poet-suicide’s tragic fate and the mementa (such a handkerchiefs with the poets’ image) produced for the reading public, meant to encourage the flow of the very tears it purported to dry.

Chapter five, In Trembling Hope: Reading and the Sympathetic Afterlife, shows that Graveyard poets continue the tradition of equating the empathetic response of its readers with a path to eternal life of the poet in the secular world; speaking to posterity becomes a personal poetic salvation of sorts. Only by means of inspiring readers to contemplate their own death, and existing eternally in the minds of the future readers, will the poet achieve eternal life. The final chapter, Post-Mortem (pun intended?), stands as the equivalent of a conclusion, and summarizes the evolution of various modes of experimental graveyard poetics towards spiritual salvation as well as secular longevity – a ‘self-governed poetic apotheosis’ (p 158).

While I did not feel that the book broke significant new ground, I did learn new things about Graveyard poetry from it. It will no doubt be a very useful companion to researchers who have made poets of this school their primary field of study.