The familiar literary-critical category of 'graveyard poetry' has made the eighteenth-century churchyard a commonplace in the period's cultural imaginary: a location in which melancholy, religious poets get lost in imaginative reveries or didactic visions of the afterlife. By contrast, Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre shows how the churchyard takes on a new shape and a fresh importance for a counter-tradition of women and labouring-class poets, for whom this landscape is a resting place with no closure. In work by Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare-but also for Robert Blair, Thomas Gray, and William Wordsworth-the churchyard emerges as a contested space of social life through a shared focus on the body as the instrument of labour. Churchyard Poetics focuses on how these poets use genres like georgic, pastoral, topographical poetry, and elegy to locate the churchyard in a broader terrain of laborious life, disarranged in the press
