Johnson's Funeral Writings

Abstract

So many have died before us, that our deaths can supply but few materials for a poet . . . after so many ... funeral dirges he must be highly favored by nature or by fortune who says anything not said before.' Johnson's remark may have been prompted by the torrent of bad elegy in the eighteenth century,2 much of it servile imitation of Lycidas and of Gray's Elegy, or melancholy effusion patterned after Young's wildly popular Night Thoughts (1742) and Robert Blair's The Grave (1743). Yet Johnson himself found it fit, on a few occasions, to shape the materials provided by the deaths of close and admired friends into a small group of prose and verse epitaphs3 and one fine elegy, On the Death of Dr. Robert Levet. Furthermore, he was interested enough in the principles of the epitaph, one of the lesser of the genres inherited from antiquity, to contribute an Essay on Epitaphs to the Gentleman's Magazine in 1740,4 and compose a remarkably detailed piece of practical criticism on Pope's epitaphs for the Universal Visitor in 1756. Better known than these two pieces, his critical comments in the Lives of the Poets on the elegies of Milton, Tickell, and Gray show that Johnson had formed ideas about the proper way of writing elegy, a closely related genre. There are some grounds, then, for looking at Johnson as a practitioner of the neo-classic genres of epitaph and elegy. The poem on Levet, which ranks among Johnson's best work, would itself justify an inquiry of this kind. Despite the fact that the elegy has been a favorite with twentieth-century readers, and has received sensitive criticism from Bertrand Bronson and others,5 it has not been examined in the full context of Johnson's work in and comment on the elegy and epitaph. Such an examination will show, I think, that Johnson was interested in generic criticism,6 knew and followed generic prescriptions, but did not feel bound by them. His elegy on Levet, indeed, derives much of its character and power from epitaphic conventions. To understand Johnson's work in these two genres, furthermore, is to go a long way toward understanding his total oeuvre.7 Death, and the proper response to it, whether in poems