Abstract
This six-page undergraduate academic research paper examines and analyzes in what respects English poet Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" is a political poem, and in what respects it is not.

Abstract
This paper traces the evolution of Romantic poetry through an analysis of key poems by Gray and Blake. The poems of Gray are "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and "Sonnet Written on the Death of Mr. Richard West". The poems of Blake are "The Lamb" and "The Tyger". The paper attempts to show how Gray adopts established forms yet handles them with a degree of freedom that allows for expressiveness. The paper then continues to show how Blake takes this a step further, adopting tradition forms from folk lore, and infusing them with a higher degree of poetic expression.

From the Paper
"The poetry of William Blake marks a step forward in the road to Romanticism. His poem are also meticulously crafted, but instead of using the sonnet form, or otherwise paying obeisance to classical norms, he employs the more indigenous and traditional forms of the song, the ballad or the nursery rhyme (Wilkinson 1974, p. 16). In spirit, though, he is a fully-fledged Romantic, in abhorrence to the scientific mechanization of the age, and gives vent to an intuitive philosophy of profound depth in his poetry. Of his Songs of Innocence and Experience, the first half consists of a set of poems devoted to the child's perspective of the world, and a child is said to be in a state nearest to God. In the poem "The Lamb", the tender, meek and passive characteristics of the child is compared to the lamb, and then again to the holiness of the other who is known as The Lamb - Jesus Christ (Blake 2007, p. 13). "

Tags:Enlightenment, spontaneity, Country, Churchyard, Lamb, Tyger

Abstract
This paper examines the mysterious visitor who pays tribute to Edgar Allan Poe at his grave in Westminster Churchyard in Baltimore, Maryland.

From the Paper
"Within the weathered brick walls of Westminster Churchyard, at the corner of Fayette and Greene Streets in Baltimore, Maryland, a cold marble shrine marks the final resting place of a tormented soul. 1 In life, he was haunted by torturing memories--memories of wrong and injustice and imputed dishonor and from a sense of some strange, impending doom. In death, his memory endures in the hearts of those who still honor his great literary genius as a poet who eternally searched for supernal beauty in a world filled with poverty and abandonment and produced some of the world's finest tales of the macabre and the supernatural"".

Tags:baltimore, churchyard, westminster