The English Poetic Epitaph: Commemoration and Conflict from Jonson to Wordsworth

English poets from Jonson to Wordsworth used poetic epitaphs—poems inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon tombs—to express their views concerning the p,ower and limitations of poetry as a response to human mortality. In the first major study of the English poetic epitaph, Joshua Scodel examines the genre's once vital role in the social construction of the dead, arguing that the poetic epitaph's changing representations of the deceased are inseparable from changing relations among the living. Drawing upon genre theory, social and cultural history, and anthropology, Scodel situates the development of the genre from the seventeenth through the early nineteenth century within the central conflicts of English collective life.

He shows how such writers as Jonson, Donne, Carew, Crashaw, Herrick, Marvell, Cowley, Dryden, Pope, Johnson, Gray, and Wordsworth transform generic conventions in order to create their individual epitaphic poetics.

Readers interested in English literary history, cultural poetics, comparative literature, the history of attitudes toward death, and the relationship between literature and the visual arts will find The English Poetic Epitaph fascinating reading.