Obituary poetry

Obituary poetry, in the broad sense, includes any poem that commemorates a person or group of people's death: an elegy.

In its stricter sense, though, it refers to a genre of popular verse or folk poetry that had its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States of America. The genre consists largely of sentimental narrative verse that tells the story of the demise of its typically named subjects and seeks to console their mourners with descriptions of their happy afterlife. The genre achieved its peak of popularity in the decade of the 1870s. While usually full chiefly of conventional pious sentiments, the obituary poets in one sense continue the program of meditations on death begun by the eighteenth-century graveyard poets, such as Edward Young's Night Thoughts, and as such continue one of the themes that went into literary Romanticism.

Obituary poetry constituted a large portion of the poetry published in American newspapers in the nineteenth century. In 1870, Mark Twain wrote an essay on "Post-mortem Poetry", in which he remarked that:

and collected examples, such as the following, occasioned by the death of Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble, aged 4 days.

The deaths of children and young adults were particular objects of inspiration to the obituary poets, who memorialized them with sentimental verse. Julia A. Moore, a poet from Michigan who published several volumes of poems mostly on obituary subjects, was a well known exponent of the genre. G. Washington Childs, sometimes called "The Laureate of Grief", was another well known exponent; he was one of the chief authors of the verse appearing in the Philadelphia Public Ledger that was noticed by Twain.Lydia Sigourney, while not confining her work to the genre, frequently contributed to it:

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