Shenstone, William

William Shenstone
13 November 1714 - 11 February 1763

English poet and landscape gardener who managed to spend seven years at Oxford (his name was on the registrar's books for ten) yet who may have never earned a degree (he claimed not to have one, although records at Pembroke College, Oxford, show him as B.A. (Parnell stood out in other ways as well, such as refusing to wear the wigs that were popular with upper-class men at the time.) He is associated, largely on the basis of a few of his elegies, with the Graveyard School poets, whose pastoral and elegiac poetry influenced Thomas Gray (and his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard"), among others. Much of Shenstone's poetry was not published until his collected works were issued posthumously in 1764, which somehow seems very appropriate for one of the Graveyard School poets....

Sites:
William Shenstone
Brief biographical note and links, as well as etexts of 26 elegies. [Literary Heritage West Midlands, UK]
"Thro' the dim veil of ev'ning's dusky shade,
   Near some lone fane, or yew's funereal green,
What dreary forms has magic fear survey'd!
   What shrouded spectres superstition seen!
-from "Elegy IV"
Biographical note
Includes brief critical appraisal and bibliography. [Wikipedia]
Brief biographical note
[NNDB]
Brief biographical note
[Columbia Encyclopedia, Bartleby]
Brief biographical note a LitGothic etext
[John W. Cousins, A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature, 1910]
The Leasowes
Garden-oriented site concerning the estate Shenstone owned and which he extensively re-landscaped; Shenstone was a noted landscape gardener who spent himself nearly into poverty "improving" (as it was then termed) his estate.
William Shenstone and the Leasowes
Scholary discussion (an early 1990s Oxford MA thesis) of Shenstone's contribution to landscape design. [Robert Harrington]
William Shenstone, The Leasowes, and Landscape Gardening
Devoted largely to discussion of Shenstone as landscape gardener, although it includes some discussion of Shenstone's poetry and its influences; includes some nice contemporary images. [RevolutionaryPlayers]
William Shenstone Papers
Holdings at Yale University Library.
Portraits
[National Portrait Gallery]


Etexts:
"Elegy IV: Ophelia's Urn" (3K)  a LitGothic etext
"A Pastoral Ballad"
Nothing gothic or graveyard about this one, but a good illustration of Shenstone's pastoral mood-making. [Kathleen Nulton Kemmerer, Penn State]
"Slender's Ghost" (3K)  a LitGothic etext
"Stanzas to the Memory of W. G." (4K)  a LitGothic etext
"Elegy XXII: Written in the Year — When the Rights of Sepulture were so Frequently Violated" [1747 ?]  (6K) a LitGothic etext
It wasn't only the C19 that had trouble with people digging up fresh corpses in order to sell them to medical schools. Compare this poem, thematically at least, to Robert Louis Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" and to Samuel Warren's "The Resurrectionist."
"William Shenstone."