The Grave (poem)

The Grave is a blank verse poem by the Scottish poet Robert Blair. It is the work for which he is primarily renowned. According to Blair, in a letter he wrote to Dr. Dodderidge, the greater part of the poem was composed before he became a minister, Edinburgh editor and publisher John Johnstone stating that it was composed whilst he was still a student, although "probably corrected and amplified by his more matured judgement". The poem, 767 lines long, is an exemplar of what became known as the school of graveyard poetry.

Part of the poem's continued prominence in scholarship involves a later printing of poems by Robert Hartley Cromek which included illustrations completed by the Romantic poet and illustrator William Blake. He completed forty illustrations for the poem, twenty of which were printed in Cromek's edition. Blake's original watercolours for the prints were believed lost, until they were rediscovered in 2003.

According to that same letter to Dodderidge, two publishers rejected the poem before it was finally first published in 1743, in London by Mr. Cooper. The grounds for rejection, as related by Blair, were that he lived too far away from London to be able to "write so as to be acceptable to the fashionable and polite". He sarcastically observed that "to what distance from the metropolis these sapient booksellers conceived poetical inspiration to extend, we are not informed".

The first edition was not particularly successful, and there was no second edition of the work until 1747, when it was republished in Edinburgh. Its popularity grew gradually throughout the 18th century, however, in part because of the praise that it received from John Pinkerton (in his Letters of Literature (1786), written under the pseudonym Robert Heron).

Writing in 1822, Richard Alfred Davenport noted that the editor of British Poets spoke of the poem with "severity" and a "contemptuous tone". Davenport contrasted this with the praise given by Thomas Campbell in his biographical sketch of Blair in British Poets. Campbell stated that "the eighteenth century has few specimens of blank verse of so powerful and so simple a character as that of The Grave", and he described the poem as popular "not merely because it is religious, but because its language and imagery are free, natural, and picturesque".

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