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.
