The Epitaphic Poetry of Crabbe and Wordsworth

Abstract

Ernest Bernhardt-Kabisch, building upon the work of Earl Austin Moore, argues that, historically, ‘the rate of specifically literary epitaph-writing is remarkably uneven’. He continues: ‘in England, two definite peaks are observable. One occurred in the first half of the seventeenth century, the other in the second half of the eighteenth century’. His subsequent claim that ‘the interest in epitaphs did not by any means die out immediately thereafter’ (Bernhardt-Kabisch, 113–14) is well-supported by a fairly lengthy census of pre-Romantic and Romantic-period literary epitaphs. Prominent among this survey is William Wordsworth, whose three ‘Essays upon Epitaphs’ (the first of which was published in Coleridge’s The Friend for 22 February 1810; the second and third remained unpublished in full until 1876) constitute not only one of the most penetrating treatments of the subject in the early nineteenth century, but also, as W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser observe, ‘a notable contribution to Romantic poetics’. George Crabbe is mentioned only in passing in Bernhardt-Kabisch’s study of Romantic epitaphic writing, and this specific example reflects something of a general trend: typically, Crabbe has been a curiously marginal figure in Romantic critical discourse, and Arthur Pollard’s view of Crabbe as a figure who ‘stands between two distinct eras, the Augustan and the Romantic, belonging in part to both, yet owing total allegiance to neither’ has become something of a commonplace, despite the fact that most of Crabbe’s mature work was published after the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. In treating Crabbe as Wordsworth’s chronological contemporary, this essay examines, admittedly selectively for reasons of economy, the notably incongruent treatment of the epitaphic in each poet’s oeuvre. Both Crabbe and Wordsworth produced several examples of what Joshua Scodel defines as the ‘poetic epitaph’: ‘a poem inscribed or purporting to be inscribed upon a tomb’. As Bernhardt-Kabisch’s list attests (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 129–31), anthologies of such poems proliferated from the early seventeenth century onwards, the chapter on ‘Epitaphes’ in William Camden’s Remaines of a Greater Worke, Concerning Britaine (1605) and John Weever’s Ancient Funerall Monuments (1631, reprinted 1767) both proving particularly influential. Periodicals too, particularly the Gentleman’s Magazine and Historical Chronicle, carried an increasing number of poetic epitaphs over the second half of the eighteenth century (see Bernhardt-Kabisch, 131–2), a fashion which continued (having survived a post-1786 lull) into the early nineteenth century: