{"id":3505,"date":"2025-04-11T11:59:07","date_gmt":"2025-04-11T10:59:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/?p=3505"},"modified":"2025-04-12T18:37:43","modified_gmt":"2025-04-12T17:37:43","slug":"digging-deep-an-interview-with-james-metcalf-on-churchyard-poetics","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/2025\/04\/11\/digging-deep-an-interview-with-james-metcalf-on-churchyard-poetics\/","title":{"rendered":"Digging Deep: An Interview with James Metcalf on Churchyard Poetics"},"content":{"rendered":"

PhD student Lai Yan Wong interviews Dr James Metcalf about his monograph <\/span><\/i>Churchyard Poetics: Landscape, Labour, and the Legacy of Genre<\/span><\/a> (Oxford University Press, 2025),<\/span> 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.\u00a0<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Unearthing the Churchyard\u2019s Layers<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

The ambition of this book is to recover the churchyard as the troubled centre of eighteenth-century poetry. (p. 1)<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Lai Yan Wong (LW): What led you to focus on churchyards as a space for understanding literature and history?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

James Metcalf (JM): <\/span><\/b>My introduction to the work of poets we now know as the \u2018graveyard school\u2019 \u2013 Thomas Parnell, Robert Blair, Edward Young, Thomas Gray \u2013 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 \u2013 partly, I think, to coordinate the novel\u2019s 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\u2019s 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LW: Many of us are familiar with Thomas Gray\u2019s <\/span><\/b>Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard<\/span><\/i><\/b>, but your book brings in poets like Mary Leapor, Ann Yearsley, Charlotte Smith, and John Clare. What\u2019s exciting or unexpected about the way they write about churchyards?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: <\/span><\/b>If, as I described them above, \u2018graveyard poems\u2019 like Gray\u2019s <\/span>Elegy<\/span><\/i> 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 \u2013 they are forgotten and unmarked in the churchyard, but at least they aren\u2019t 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 \u2018graveyard school\u2019, these poets can take up its terrain for different purposes, including those of political complaint.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

Pulling back the curtain of \u2018graveyard poetry\u2019 makes the churchyard newly visible as a social landscape with its own history. (p. 18)<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

LW:<\/span><\/b> Why is the distinction between \u2018graveyard\u2019 and \u2018churchyard\u2019 important, and how does it shift our reading of eighteenth-century poetry?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: <\/span><\/b>As a rough shorthand, a churchyard is a kind of graveyard, but a graveyard is not a kind of churchyard \u2013 because (the obvious reason) it doesn\u2019t 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 \u2013 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 \u2018churchyard\u2019 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LW: <\/span><\/b>Churchyard Poetics<\/span><\/i><\/b> 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?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: <\/span><\/b>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\u2019s long didactic poem <\/span>The Grave<\/span><\/i> is often read as an exemplary \u2018graveyard poem\u2019 for its gory fixation on the decaying corpse and its orthodox didacticism to lead a righteous life before it\u2019s too late. I read the poem differently, as a kind of \u2018churchyard georgic\u2019, 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 <\/span>agricultural<\/span><\/i> didacticism exercised by its striving against death and decay \u2013 the recalcitrant elements of nature against which the labouring body contends. So, \u2018churchyard georgic\u2019 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.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The Long Road to Print<\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LW: Publishing the first book is a huge milestone! What was the most challenging part of the writing and publishing process?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: <\/span><\/b>Patience. The pressure to publish after completing the PhD but before securing that first academic post is intense, sometimes frightening, and in practical terms counterintuitive. Good research takes time, and that time quickly evaporates when you\u2019re also applying for jobs and postdocs. OUP\u2019s relaxed pace (from initial drafting to peer review to author edits to copyedits to proofs) made me slow down and think carefully about the book I wanted to write, for which I\u2019m incredibly grateful (even if only in retrospect). I feel prouder of this book that took longer to produce because it has genuinely grown from and built upon my thesis.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LW: This book began as your PhD research. Do you have any advice for PhD students who are hoping to transform their dissertation into a monograph?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM: <\/span><\/b>The first question my editor asked after I wrote to them about publishing with OUP was: \u2018How will the book be different from your thesis?\u2019 This may not be a principle followed by all academic presses, but it is an important question, even if it ultimately delays publication. I put together a proposal quite quickly after finishing my PhD, then took two years to write the book I thought I wanted, and another two refining that book after peer review and workshopping ideas with friends and colleagues. This gave me what I needed for the job market, because my CV could say my book was under review. But it also meant I could take real time puzzling out what I wanted my first book to be, how I wanted it to represent me for the rest of my career. Finding your own way to balance those competing demands of immediate results with long-term ambitions is my vague piece of advice. That and keeping up all the relationships with other students, mentors, and conference friends you make during your PhD, because those people are your academic community and having that helps a lot.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

LW: Last question (and a cliche one) … what\u2019s next? Are there new research directions you\u2019re exploring?<\/span><\/b>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

JM:<\/span><\/b> In the final rewrites of my book, I started thinking about style and tone as the places that a poem might work through disruptive subjects or feelings, and not necessarily solely for the purposes of regulation. I\u2019m continuing to think about style and affect in my new project \u2018Queer Conventionality: Styles of Quiet Critique\u2019, which also takes my interest in the poetry of the long eighteenth century in new theoretical and political directions, with its combination of poetics with gender and sexuality studies. Anyone interested can read more details <\/span>here<\/span><\/a>.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n

*<\/span>Churchyard Poetics<\/span><\/i> was launched at King\u2019s College London in March 2025, with the support of the Centre for Early Modern Studies and the Department of English\u2019s Cultural Production and the Organisation of Knowledge Research Strand.<\/span>\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1337,"featured_media":3506,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1143,912,16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3505","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cultural-production-and-the-organisation-of-knowledge","category-insights","category-interviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1337"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3505"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3510,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3505\/revisions\/3510"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3506"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3505"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3505"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kcl.ac.uk\/english\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3505"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}