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Cultural Production and the Organisation of Knowledge Insights Interviews

Digging Deep: An Interview with James Metcalf on Churchyard Poetics

PhD student Lai Yan Wong interviews Dr James Metcalf about his monograph Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre (Oxford University Press, 2025), and his journey from PhD to publication. A former KCL alumnus, James is now a Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century English Literature at the University of Manchester, where his research explores poetry, affect, labour, gender, and sexuality.  

Unearthing the Churchyard’s Layers 

The ambition of this book is to recover the churchyard as the troubled centre of eighteenth-century poetry. (p. 1) 

Lai Yan Wong (LW): What led you to focus on churchyards as a space for understanding literature and history? 

James Metcalf (JM): My introduction to the work of poets we now know as the ‘graveyard school’ – Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young, Thomas Gray – was through epigraphs in the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe. She quoted passages of their poems, and others of the mid-eighteenth century, at the beginnings of chapters – partly, I think, to coordinate the novel’s evolving mood. These are quite moody poems: melancholy, often alarmingly visceral in their attention to the mortal body, and to varying degrees didactic. I thought then, and I still think, that at the level of tone and style, these are intriguingly unsettled poems; and their inclusion in Radcliffe’s novels, like their uptake by Romantic poets including Charlotte Smith, John Clare, and William Wordsworth, speaks to a cultural afterlife that tries to come to terms with the strained feelings these poems strive at once to express and contain. 

LW: Many of us are familiar with Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard, but your book brings in poets like Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare. What’s exciting or unexpected about the way they write about churchyards? 

JM: If, as I described them above, ‘graveyard poems’ like Gray’s Elegy are at some level uneasy, they nevertheless attempt to control their unease: for Gray, that control is exerted through a pastoral retrospection that, while expressing a melancholy measure of grief, reflects on the limited lives of the buried poor as aesthetically and morally proper – they are forgotten and unmarked in the churchyard, but at least they aren’t corrupted by the world beyond its enclosure. This is simplifying the case quite a bit, and I explain in the book that such a disciplined containment of difficult political realities is neither easy nor straightforward for Gray. The contrast is a useful provocation, though, because Leapor, Yearsley, Smith, and Clare cannot or do not attempt to contain those difficult realities. From outside the borders of the ‘graveyard school’, these poets can take up its terrain for different purposes, including those of political complaint. 

Pulling back the curtain of ‘graveyard poetry’ makes the churchyard newly visible as a social landscape with its own history. (p. 18) 

LW: Why is the distinction between ‘graveyard’ and ‘churchyard’ important, and how does it shift our reading of eighteenth-century poetry? 

JM: As a rough shorthand, a churchyard is a kind of graveyard, but a graveyard is not a kind of churchyard – because (the obvious reason) it doesn’t have a church. By the eighteenth century in Britain there were different types of burial ground, including nondenominational (or at least not solely Anglican) graveyards, setting a precedent for the nineteenth-century cemetery. The reason the churchyard remains so prominent in the culture of the time, including in its poetry, is that it was the oldest and most established place of burial – and not only of burial: historians have documented just how much cultural life took place in churchyards, including markets, games, fairs, and acts of justice. Given this historical and cultural priority, it seems important to recognise that poets use the word ‘churchyard’ in their work because this site is familiar and resonant, with a deep and complicated, often contested history of life and death across communities and over millennia. 

LW: Churchyard Poetics revisits traditional poetic genres such as georgic, pastoral, elegy, and topographical poetry. Could you give an example of how one of these genres is disrupted or reshaped in the poems you examine? 

JM: The presence of the churchyard in these poems pushes poetic genres to accommodate the challenging subjects of death and the suffering of bodies under duress. For example, Robert Blair’s long didactic poem The Grave is often read as an exemplary ‘graveyard poem’ for its gory fixation on the decaying corpse and its orthodox didacticism to lead a righteous life before it’s too late. I read the poem differently, as a kind of ‘churchyard georgic’, to highlight how its dying and dead bodies emerge in the poem as implements of work, icons of the hard life of labour, which means they cannot so easily be elevated by a religious imperative to look to the afterlife. This reading also reshapes georgic, which is a genre of agricultural didacticism exercised by its striving against death and decay – the recalcitrant elements of nature against which the labouring body contends. So, ‘churchyard georgic’ reconfigures both the churchyard poem and the georgic poem because it brings to the surface the difficult matter of the body that both traditions, in their different ways, try to overcome or set aside. 

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Interviews

Liberal Arts undergraduate student wins poetry prize!

Issy Craig-Wood, a Liberal Arts BA student in the Department of Interdisciplinary Humanities, won a poetry competition for her piece ‘Love Can Give You This Cool Shark (Journal Entry).’

Image: A Ptychodus fossil specimen, which inspired Issy’s poem. (Wikimedia Commons)

The contest, which was organised by the Young Poets Network in The Poetry Society, awarded a prize to the best poem on the theme of Poetry as (Optimistic) Prophecy.

Issy’s entry was submitted from her journal, where she writes poetry as a tool to shape her thoughts into something concrete, with intention, patterns and meaning.

I was very surprised to win this competition, the poem was written when I was very tired and submitted on an utter whim. I read the prompt for optimistic prophecy, and it linked in so well with my journal entry that I decided to submit it to the competition. I was not expecting to win, I just needed somewhere to put my thoughts that felt more significant than just on paper.

-Issy Craig-Wood, Liberal Arts BA student.

The poem was inspired by a fossilised shark uncovered in Mexico, the struggle to be optimistic, and the future of Quakerism, which Issy has been involved with since childhood.

Dr Alan Marshall, Reader in American Literature in the Department of English, was impressed by the depth of Issy’s poem.

The poem begins with a detail that seems accidental and gratuitous, but which also suggests the mysterious depths of the earth, of the ocean – a shark! But the speaker is also interested in love, hope, and learning to “look after others.” The poem seems to ask what the relationship might be between our impulse to look after others and how we respond to a creature like a shark (or a dinosaur), which on the surface doesn’t need looking after. The connective tissue is responsive joy – the readiness to take pleasure in the world we find around us, expressed as a T-shirt (“I could make that”). The poem as a T-shirt.
– Dr Alan Marshall, Reader in American Literature.
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19th Century Book Review Insights Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916’

By Richard Kirkland

Written by Professor of Irish Literature & Cultural Theory Richard Kirkland, Irish London: A Cultural History 1850-1916 was published by Bloomsbury in September 2021, and has a paperback release forthcoming in 2022.

What drew you to this subject?

I’ve always written about Irish culture – it’s been my life really – and in the area of Camden where I live the history of Irish London is inescapable and compelling. So I hoped the book would be a way of connecting my research interests with my day-to-day experience and the friends I have here. I’ve also thought a good deal about London itself over the years, partly because it is such a strong research and teaching area in the English department. In fact, so many of the events I describe in the book happened within a few hundred yards of what is now the Virginia Woolf Building!

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20th - 21st Centuries Book Review Insights Interviews

New Book Releases: ‘Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction’

By James Baxter

Written by London-based independent scholar James Baxter, Samuel Beckett’s Legacies in American Fiction: Problems in Postmodernism was published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2021, as part of their series ‘New Interpretations of Beckett in the Twenty First Century.’

What drew you to this subject?

At the outset, I think it was an intuited connection between a lot of the fiction that I was reading and enjoying at the time; Beckett of course, but also American writers like Donald Barthelme, Robert Coover, Thomas Pynchon, etc. A lot of headache-inducing postmodern stuff. While there is certainly no shortage of scholarship on Beckett’s relation to the more theoretical body of postmodernism, I was quite struck by the absence of any sustained work on literary postmodernism and the way Beckett skewers the work of periodisation by serving as an end but also a beginning for this new paradigm (not unlike the kind of stalled narrative sequences that a reader encounters in his mid-century Trilogy).

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Insights Interviews

INDUCTION WEEK SOMERSETTING TAKEOVER: FIRST YEAR MODULE EARLY MODERN LITERARY CULTURE

Each year, departing third-year students in our department put together a guide for arriving first years. This year’s magazine – titled “Somersetting” – offers a student perspective on studying English at King’s and addresses some issues of concern for new students. During induction week, the blog will be spotlighting sections of this year’s magazine. 

For today, we have an insight into the module ‘Early Modern Literary Culture’, including a chat with Dr Sarah Lewis, the module convenor.