Blair, Robert

1699 - 4 February 1746

Scottish poet and minister, one of the more prominent members of the Graveyard School (sometimes regarded as the "founding father" of the whole enterprise, although Thomas Parnell's "Night Piece on Death" was in fact earlier), Blair is best known for The Grave, which went through 49 editions by 1798, the year Wordsworth and Coleridge published their watershed work of Romantic poetry, Lyrical Ballads. Blair's poem continued to be popular well into the C19.

Sites:
Biographical note
[Electric Scotland]
Biographical note
Part of The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer, ed. by the Rev. George Gilfillan and first published in 1854.
Brief biographical note
[1911 Encyclopedia]
Brief biographical note
[Scottish Writers on the Internet]
Brief biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby.com]
Brief biographical note
[Wikipedia]
Brief biographical note a LitGothic etext
[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]

... gather round, and wonder at the Tale
Of horrid Apparition, tall and ghastly,
That walks at Dead of Night, or takes his Stand
O'er some new-open'd Grave; and, strange to tell!
Evanishes at Crowing of the Cock.
-from The Grave


Etexts:
The Grave  [1743]  
At times, with Graveyard School poetry, it can be difficult to see those elements which would have influenced Gothic fiction, especially in the more horrific manifestations of the form. With Blair's poem, however, there's no such difficulty; this work is flat-out, delightfully horrific, at least in its opening couple of hundred lines (the poem gets much less "graveyardy," and much more moralistic, in its later two-thirds). Be sure not to miss the part about the smell of decaying corpses (you'll need to read the longer excerpt to get to that good part....)
- complete etext
Part of The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair and Falconer, this Project Gutenberg etext contains a hypertextual table of contents for the quick location of Blair's poem.
- Longer excerpt (the first 236 lines) [PDF] a LitGothic etext
- Brief excerpt (the first 110 lines) [U Toronto]
- Sample pages
Not the etext, but William Blake's powerful illustrations (engraved by Louis Schiavonetti) for the 1808 edition of Blair's poem published by Robert H. Cromek. This edition was quite popular throughout much of the C19, becoming one of the best-known examples of Blake's work. [National Gallery of Victoria]
- Sample pages
Another site, same work as above. Highly Recommended; the images at this site are of very high quality. [BlakeArchive.org]
- Blake's illustrations in a downloadable PDF file. [U North Texas]
- Brief note on Blake's involvement with the illustrated edition of The Grave
- E-facsimile of a 1787 edition of The Grave (and Gray's Elegy). [U of Oxford; Thomas Gray Archive]

"Robert Blair."