Is there a place for poetry centered on the morose in the 2026?

The world it seems is in a state of decay. We’re rapidly approaching the climate reckoning that will usher in plagues and famines, economic collapse and mass migration/displacement, and widespread habitat and species annihilation. Autocracy ascends in any direction on the compass. Fertility is swan-diving hand-in-hand with population growth rates. An AI revolt looms like Mephistopheles at the door.

“…our eager hope
believes its highest goal has been obtained
and finds the portals of fulfillment opened wide:
then there bursts forth from those eternal depths
excess of flame, and so we halt confounded;
our wish had been to light the torch of life –
instead, a very sea of fire engulfs us.”

Goethe, Faust Part II, Act I, 4704-4710 ¹

Do we not have cause to be glum? Poetry is, of course, many things but its finest incarnation is as mirror to the human condition, singular and shared. This may be a propitious moment to reclaim the tradition of graveyard poetry, that pre-Romantic school of verse (not without its controversy, mind) well taken with the lugubrious, the moribund, the sublime.

A new generation of graveyard poets would have to create a different vocabulary built around modern images and sensibilities toward death. We’re a few centuries of past the Gothic era and tropes (skulls, coffins, all the tings festooned around the modern iteration of Samhain) would be hard to avoid. Nonetheless, we need a collection of novel poems that reflect what many sense about the times in which we live: the unceasing sense of experience and space in decline.

We could speak of the loss of human dignity and autonomy under the lash of smart phone/surveillance/commodification technology. How the soul evanesces when it’s converted to digital bits! Has the monolithic power of social media not become the visage of Death itself, enfeebling our will to experience life substantially? Anthropogenic climate destruction the miasma, the encroaching darkness?

If you’re a reader and writer, how would you approach a new school of graveyard poetry? What potential and what limitations do you see?

1. Von Goethe, J. W. (2014). Faust I & II, Volume 2: Goethe’s Collected Works – Updated Edition. Princeton University Press. ↩︎