Literature Atlas

How Stories Are Told
Sign In
Text size
100%
Theme
Genre

Obituary Poetry

Lyric and Short Poetic Forms

Obituary poetry, broadly defined, includes poems and elegies commemorating the deaths of a person or group. In its stricter sense it names a form of popular and folk verse that flourished in the nineteenth-century United States, consisting of sentimental narrative poems documenting named individuals' deaths and offering grieving families consolation through images of heavenly peace, with prominent practitioners including Julia A. Moore, G. Washington Childs and Lydia Sigourney.

Facts
Place of Origin
United States 1
Notable Example
Julia A. Moore 1
Defining Trait
Sentimental narrative verse commemorating a named person's death and consoling mourners with descriptions of a happy afterlife 1
In the Other Atlases
Sources
1. Obituary poetry - Wikipedia
  • Lead, sentence 2
    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.
  • Obituary poets section
    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
  • Lead, sentence 3
    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.
View the Source
Comments (0)
No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.
Reader Challenges (0)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.