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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.〔Julia A. Moore, ''Mortal Refrains: The Complete Collected Poetry, Prose, and Songs of Julia A. Moore, The Sweet Singer of Michigan'' Thomas A. Riedlinger, ed. (Michigan State University Press (1998) ISBN 0-87013-449-3), p. 6〕 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.〔See generally, James Stevens Curl, ''The Victorian Celebration of Death'' (Sutton, 2000: ISBN 0-7509-2318-0), ch. 1〕 ==Death poetry in the popular press== Obituary poetry constituted a large portion of the poetry published in American newspapers〔See generally, Slason Thomson (ed.), ''(The Humbler Poets: A Collection of Newspaper and Periodical Verse )'' (Jansen McClug &Co., 1886)〕 in the nineteenth century.〔Walter Blair, ''Essays on American humor: Blair through the ages'', Hamlin Lewis Hill, ed. (Univ of Wisconsin Press, 1993; ISBN 0-299-13624-8), p. (109 )〕 In 1870, Mark Twain wrote an essay on "Post-mortem Poetry",〔Mark Twain, Post-mortem Poetry〕 in which he remarked that: :In Philadelphia they have a custom which it would be pleasant to see adopted throughout the land. It is that of appending to published death-notices a little verse or two of comforting poetry. Any one who is in the habit of reading the daily Philadelphia LEDGER must frequently be touched by these plaintive tributes to extinguished worth. In Philadelphia, the departure of a child is a circumstance which is not more surely followed by a burial than by the accustomed solacing poesy in the PUBLIC LEDGER. In that city death loses half its terror because the knowledge of its presence comes thus disguised in the sweet drapery of verse. and collected examples, such as the following, occasioned by the death of Samuel Pervil Worthington Doble, aged 4 days. :''Our little Sammy's gone, His tiny spirit's fled; Our little boy we loved so dear Lies sleeping with the dead.'' :''A tear within a father's eye, A mother's aching heart, Can only tell the agony How hard it is to part.'' 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「obituary poetry」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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