Churchyard poets

"Churchyard Poets" or "Graveyard Poets" is a critical term applied in retrospect to a number of English poets of the 1740s to the 1790s who wrote in the vein of Thomas Gray's Elegy in a Country Churchyard (1750). These poets are also sometimes called "pre-Romantics." Despite the name, the term encompasses at least two major works written before Gray's Elegy: James Thomson's The Seasons (1726 - 1730) and Edward Young's Night Thoughts (1742 - 1745).

References

• Noyes, Russell (Ed.) (1956). English Romantic Poetry and Prose. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-501007-8