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The Graveyard School I think should be expanded to the writers Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Baudelaire. The latter was famous for his macabre setting and theme. His poems were drenched in depression, sadism, immorality, among others. The 'graveyard' is a constant theme, which came initially from the Gothic period of writing, then was churned about by the Romantic poets. Aside from Mary Shelley's 'Frankenstein', death was a constant theme in Romantic poetry. See Keats 'When I Have Fears...'. The Gothic was sometimes embraced so much that the poets themselves acted out their lives in macabre fashion, withdrawing into oneself and keeping others away was a popular symptom of the Graveyard School. If this may also be extended to musicians, there was a chilling anecdote of Chopin's mistress George Sand, who said he played (the piano) sometimes imagining he was dead, almost in a trance. There was also a rumour, coming back to the world of literature, that Percey Bysshe Shelley took Mary Shelley's virginity on her mother's (Mary Wollstonecraft-Godwin's) gravestone. This last little story does everything the Graveyard School would like: crossing sex with death, and closeness with the dead. If it were not for the Romantics, the Graveyarders - I shall call them - would not have been as popular as they were; Romanticism introduced a new freedom in poetry that resulted in introspection becoming a more and more acceptable theme for writers and the public alike. The introspection led to thoughts on mortality, the embrace of a poet's mind, despondancy, and a strange connection to the dead.

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