The Grave

The Grave may refer to:

See also

The Grave (film)

The Grave is a 1996 thriller starring Craig Sheffer, Gabrielle Anwar and Josh Charles. Its plot concerns two convicts who escape from prison to find a buried treasure.

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The Grave (poem)

The Grave is a blank verse poem by the Scottish poet Robert Blair. It is the work for which he is primarily renowned. According to Blair, in a letter he wrote to Dr. Dodderidge, the greater part of the poem was composed before he became a minister, Edinburgh editor and publisher John Johnstone stating that it was composed whilst he was still a student, although "probably corrected and amplified by his more matured judgement". The poem, 767 lines long, is an exemplar of what became known as the school of graveyard poetry.

Part of the poem's continued prominence in scholarship involves a later printing of poems by Robert Hartley Cromek which included illustrations completed by the Romantic poet and illustrator William Blake. He completed forty illustrations for the poem, twenty of which were printed in Cromek's edition. Blake's original watercolours for the prints were believed lost, until they were rediscovered in 2003.

First publication and critical reception

According to that same letter to Dodderidge, two publishers rejected the poem before it was finally first published in 1743, in London by Mr. Cooper. The grounds for rejection, as related by Blair, were that he lived too far away from London to be able to "write so as to be acceptable to the fashionable and polite". He sarcastically observed that "to what distance from the metropolis these sapient booksellers conceived poetical inspiration to extend, we are not informed".