A Short History of Dark Poetry

## A Short History of Dark Poetry by Holly Lyn Walrath

Dark elements have always been a part of poetry. Early poems like the Epic of Gilgamesh, the bible’s psalms, The Odyssey, and the Vedas all contained dark and disturbing themes and imagery. Take for example, Psalm 88:

> Lord, you are the God who saves me;
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>    day and night I cry out to you.
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> **2** May my prayer come before you;
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>    turn your ear to my cry.
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> **3** I am overwhelmed with troubles
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>    and my life draws near to death.
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> **4** I am counted among those who go down to the pit;
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>    I am like one without strength.
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> **5** I am set apart with the dead,
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>    like the slain who lie in the grave,
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> whom you remember no more,
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>    who are cut off from your care.
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> **6** You have put me in the lowest pit,
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>    in the darkest depths.
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> **7** Your wrath lies heavily on me;
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>    you have overwhelmed me with all your waves.[d]
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> **8** You have taken from me my closest friends
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>    and have made me repulsive to them.
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> I am confined and cannot escape;
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> **9**     my eyes are dim with grief.
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> I call to you, Lord, every day;
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>    I spread out my hands to you.
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> **10** Do you show your wonders to the dead?
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>    Do their spirits rise up and praise you?
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> **11** Is your love declared in the grave,
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>    your faithfulness in Destruction[e]?
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> **12** Are your wonders known in the place of darkness,
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>    or your righteous deeds in the land of oblivion?
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> **13** But I cry to you for help, Lord;
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>    in the morning my prayer comes before you.
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> **14** Why, Lord, do you reject me
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>    and hide your face from me?
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> **15** From my youth I have suffered and been close to death;
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>    I have borne your terrors and am in despair.
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> **16** Your wrath has swept over me;
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>    your terrors have destroyed me.
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> **17** All day long they surround me like a flood;
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>    they have completely engulfed me.
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> **18** You have taken from me friend and neighbor—
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>    darkness is my closest friend.
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The psalm is largely regarded as one of the darkest passages of the bible. I consider some of the phrases here as the bedrock of dark poetry. Images like “the pit”, the “wrath” of god, the “flood”,  “the land of oblivion” and “the place of darkness” permeate dark poetry still today.
Here’s an excerpt from Tablet I of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a Mesopotamian poem dated around 2100 BCE. It describes a man’s reaction to seeing Enkidu, a tragic hero created by the gods to stop Gilgamesh:

> He was rigid with fear; though stock-still
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> his heart pounded and his face drained of color.
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> He was miserable to the core,
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> and his face looked like one who had made a long journey.
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Below is a short section of The Odyssey. In it, Odysseus is nearly trapped at sea after escaping “being flayed alive, his bones crushed”.

> Just as that fear went churning through his mind a tremendous roller swept him toward the rocky coast where he’d have been flayed alive, his bones crushed, if the bright-eyed goddess Pallas had not inspired him now. He lunged for a reef, he seized it with both hands and clung for dear life, groaning until the giant wave surged past and so he escaped its force, but the breaker’s backwash charged into him full fury and hurled him out to sea.
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Shipwrecks and the fury of the ocean were common themes in early dark poetry. One of the earliest speculative poems is the Tale of the Shipwrecked Sailor, written around 2500 BCE in Egypt. Early epics were usually focused around one central (male) hero who had to overcome trials and adversities, creatures and monsters, in order to get home or achieve a task. From Hercules fighting the hydra to Beowulf slaying Grendel, monsters have played significant roles in poetry for eons.

> Great sorrow endured how the dire-mooded creature
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> In unlooked-for assaults were likely to bear him.
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> No thought had the monster of deferring the matter,
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> But on earliest occasion he quickly laid hold of
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> A soldier asleep, suddenly tore him,
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> Bit his bone-prison, the blood drank in currents,
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> Swallowed in mouthfuls: he soon had the dead man’s
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> Feet and hands, too, eaten entirely.
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While early epics may have utilized dark poetry elements to create fear in their listeners, these early poems were essentially adventure stories. The darkness wasn’t the focus—it was a part of the story necessary to prove the hero’s worth. These poems were often religious in nature. Dante venturing into Hell and being beset by beasts and demons would have truly frightened the audience at the time, who often saw demons as real beings that might prey on the weak.

It isn’t until the advent of the gothic period in literature that dark poetry arises as we know and love it. Gloomy, woeful, and concerned with the romance of the graveyard. In the 1700s, a group of poets arose called themselves the “Graveyard Poets”. These writers wrote “melancholy, reflective works, often set in graveyards, on the theme of human mortality.” (The Concise Oxford Companion to English Literature, 4th ed., 2012)

The Graveyard Poets are often considered the precursors to gothic literature as a movement. One of the most famous poems from this group was “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” by Thomas Gray (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44299/elegy-written-in-a-country-churchyard). The narrative of the poem follows a speaker in a churchyard describing the idyllic countryside. It even ends with an imagined Epitaph (a poem that would have appeared on a gravestone.) The poem was popular enough to be reprinted several times in the poet’s life.

Another popular poem of the time was “The Grave” by Robert Blair (https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/content/grave). It was printed with illustrations by William Blake in 1808. Blair’s opening lines style him as a self-proclaimed dark poet: “the task be mine, / to paint the gloomy horrors of the tomb / the appointed place of rendezvous, where all / these travellers meet.”

The Graveyard Poets began the style of dark poetry that is most well-known. The poems are often highly structured and rhyming. They often have a gloomy atmosphere and are set in graveyards or spooky places “midst skulls and coffins, epitaphs and tombs.” They write about death in a way that romanticizes or even personifies it. Ecphonesis (exclamatory phrases like O!) abound.

The dark poet is often tempted as Edward Young put it in his poem Night Thoughts to go “reeling through the wilderness of joy; / Where sense runs savage, broke from reason’s chain, / And sings false peace, till smother’d by the pall.” For the Graveyard Poets, dark poetry held a sinister fascination not unlike joy—a joy at the beauty and romanticism of death.

But not all representations of death were dark. Poets like Keats often turned the darkness in their poetry to light, ending in a dreamy, ethereal sensibility:

> After dark vapors have oppress'd our plains
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> For a long dreary season, comes a day
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> Born of the gentle South, and clears away
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> From the sick heavens all unseemly stains.
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> The anxious month, relieved of its pains,
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> Takes as a long-lost right the feel of May;
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> The eyelids with the passing coolness play
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> Like rose leaves with the drip of Summer rains.
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> The calmest thoughts came round us; as of leaves
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> Budding -- fruit ripening in stillness -- Autumn suns
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> Smiling at eve upon the quiet sheaves --
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> Sweet Sappho's cheek -- a smiling infant's breath --
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> The gradual sand that through an hour-glass runs --
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> A woodland rivulet -- a Poet's death.
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This turn toward the hopeful is something repeated across the history of dark poetry. As Keats said, “Ay, on the shores of darkness there is a light, and precipices show untrodden green; there is a budding morrow in midnight; there is triple sight in blindness keen.” The Graveyard poets established that writing about darkness gave a different cast to the power of lightness.

In the 1700s, Gothic literature became popular in Europe, starting around 1764. It coincided with the rise of Gothic architecture. Across England, tourists began to flock to picturesque ruins in order to write poetry on “decay and ruination”. Among the poets of the Gothic include William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge,

Lord Byron was one of the first poets to explore the idea of vampirism in his 1813 epic, “The Giaour”.

> But first, on earth as vampire sent,
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> Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
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> Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
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> And suck the blood of all thy race;
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> There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
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> At midnight drain the stream of life;
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> Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
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> Must feed thy livid living corpse:
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> Thy victims ere they yet expire
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> Shall know the demon for their sire,
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> As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
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> Thy flowers are withered on the stem.
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Sounds a bit like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, doesn’t it? From Byron we get the idea of the “Byronic hero”—a character type that describes a proud, moody, and gloomy male lead. A man of “loneliness and mystery” as Byron put it, who was often part hero and part villain. Another vampire poem of the time is Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797) about a bride who returns from the grave to haunt her fiancé.
Poets of the time saw poetry as an essential way to study dark topics, including the new fascination with crime and murder. Robert Browning was the first dark poet to write a “psychological monologue” placing the reader in the point of view of murderers and mad men in poems published in his 1842 “Dramatic Lyrics”, including the poem “Madhouse Cells” (“Porphyria’s Lover”). Browning also wrote the first true crime poem in “The Ring and the Book” (1868).

> That moment she was mine, mine, fair,
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>     Perfectly pure and good:  I found
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> A thing to do, and all her hair
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>     In one long yellow string I wound
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>     Three times her little throat around,  40
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> And strangled her.  No pain felt she;
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>     I am quite sure she felt no pain.
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Gothic poets struggled with the “loss of God” in a world turning away from religiosity. Whereas early dark poets were focused on the demons of the Bible, as modernity marched closer, dark poets became more focused on the terrors caused by humanity. Such poems were an “exploration of perverse states of mind rationalized beyond sense…a symptom of mid-century concerns regarding the nature of human consciousness in a world beset with existential doubts, social upheaval, rapid industrialization, and class conflict” (Cardin, Matt, ed. *Horror Literature Through History: An Encyclopedia of the Stories That Speak to Our Deepest Fears*. New York: Bloomsbury Publishing USA, 2017, 81).

This period became inspiration for later Gothic poets of the Victorian era, like Edgar Allen Poe, who surely drew inspiration from August Bürger’s epic ballad “Lenore” (1773), one of the earliest examples of the “corpse bride” trope.

The industrial revolution (1760-1840) brought even more of a rift as the horror of the working classes increased while at the same time more people could read. Workmills, tightly packed living quarters, unsafe factories, and child labor were just a few of the horrors the modern era brought. William Blake wrote an early nod to the fate of child workers in “The Chimney Sweeper” (1789)

> When my mother died I was very young,
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> And my father sold me while yet my tongue
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> Could scarcely cry " 'weep! 'weep! 'weep! 'weep!"
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> So your chimneys I sweep & in soot I sleep.
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> There's little Tom Dacre, who cried when his head
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> That curled like a lamb's back, was shaved, so I said,
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> "Hush, Tom! never mind it, for when your head's bare,
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> You know that the soot cannot spoil your white hair."
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> And so he was quiet, & that very night,
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> As Tom was a-sleeping he had such a sight!
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> That thousands of sweepers, Dick, Joe, Ned, & Jack,
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> Were all of them locked up in coffins of black;
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Nature became the refuge of the dark poet, while the city became a den of crime, murder, and terror. As Robert Burns wrote:

> Farewell to the forests and wild-hanging woods;
> Farewell to the torrents and loud-pouring floods.
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However, literacy meant a demand for popular fiction arose. Around the 1840s, the “Penny Dreadful” became widespread in England. These short chapbooks or pamphlets were the precursors to the 1900s pulp magazines. They recounted the deeds of highwaymen, murderers, and brigands, telling the stories of “Gentleman Jack”, “The Flying Dutchman”, and “Sweeney Todd.” The following poem, published in *Punch* (1841), shows what most thought of the lurid tales:

> “Alas! for the poor ‘Penny Dreadful’!
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> They say if a boy gets his head-full
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> Of terrors and crimes,
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> He turns pirate — sometimes;
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> …
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> Such literature is not healthy;
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> But does it make urchins turn stealthy
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> Depleters of tills.
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> Destroyers of wills,
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> Or robbers of relatives wealthy?
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> …
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> A lad, who’s a natural ‘villing’
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> When reading or robbing and killing
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> May feel wish to do so;
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> But Sheppard — like Crusoe —
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> To your average boy’s only ‘thrilling.’
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> …
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> Let us put down the vile,
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> Yet endeavour the while,
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> To be *just* to the poor ‘Penny Dreadful’!”
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Dark poet Emily Brontë was said to draw inspiration from magazines of the time such as *Blackwood’s Magazine*. These magazines often featured dark poetry.

I Am the Only Being Whose Doom

BY EMILY BRONTË

I am the only being whose doom

No tongue would ask, no eye would mourn;

I never caused a thought of gloom,

A smile of joy, since I was born.

In secret pleasure, secret tears,

This changeful life has slipped away,

As friendless after eighteen years,

As lone as on my natal day.

There have been times I cannot hide,

There have been times when this was drear,

When my sad soul forgot its pride

And longed for one to love me here.

But those were in the early glow

Of feelings since subdued by care;

And they have died so long ago,

I hardly now believe they were.

First melted off the hope of youth,

Then fancy’s rainbow fast withdrew;

And then experience told me truth

In mortal bosoms never grew.

’Twas grief enough to think mankind

All hollow, servile, insincere;

But worse to trust to my own mind

And find the same corruption there.

Women poets feature more prominently in Victorian dark poetry, including Christina Rossetti, who wrote one of the first dark fairy tales in “Goblin Market”. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44996/goblin-market

Though the goblins cuff’d and caught her,

Coax’d and fought her,

Bullied and besought her,

Scratch’d her, pinch’d her black as ink,

Kick’d and knock’d her,

Maul’d and mock’d her,

Lizzie utter’d not a word;

Would not open lip from lip

Lest they should cram a mouthful in:

But laugh’d in heart to feel the drip

Of juice that syrupp’d all her face,

And lodg’d in dimples of her chin,

And streak’d her neck which quaked like curd.

At last the evil people,

Worn out by her resistance,

Flung back her penny, kick’d their fruit

Along whichever road they took,

Not leaving root or stone or shoot;

Some writh’d into the ground,

Some div’d into the brook

With ring and ripple,

Some scudded on the gale without a sound,

Some vanish’d in the distance.

She Walketh Veiled and Sleeping

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

She walketh veiled and sleeping,

For she knoweth not her power;

She obeyeth but the pleading

Of her heart, and the high leading

Of her soul, unto this hour.

Slow advancing, halting, creeping,

Comes the Woman to the hour!—

She walketh veiled and sleeping,

For she knoweth not her power.

Several poets were members of the Order of the Golden Dawn, one of the earliest societies dedicated to the study and practice of the occult, an early precursor to modern day Wicca. The Order’s most famous member is Aleister Crowley. He wrote a book of poetry in 1910 called *The Winged Beetle*, but was better known for coming up with most of the tropes of witchcraft like using toads for magic.

Poet William Butler Yeats was also a member. He saw himself as a magician and his poems as proof of his powers.

“Now as to magic. It is surely absurd to hold me “weak” or otherwise because I choose to persist in a study which I decided deliberately four or five years ago to make, next to my poetry, the most important pursuit of my life…If I had not made magic my constant study I could not have written a single word of my Blake book [*The Works of William Blake*, with Edwin Ellis, 1893], nor would *The Countess Kathleen* [stage play, 1892] have ever come to exist. The mystical life is the center of all that I do and all that I think and all that I write.”

(https://www.laphamsquarterly.org/magic-shows/w-b-yeats-magus)

French Gothic poet Paul Verlaine came up with this definition of horror: “It is made of a mixture of the carnal spirit and the sad flesh, of all the violent splendours of the declining empire.” Verlaine was part of the “decadent’ school of the *Fin de siècle* (end of the century), a period of literature categorized by its cynicism about the world and “lurid” themes. Verlaine, amusingly, called his fellow poets poète maudit ("cursed poet") to refer to poets who wrote about topics considered against the grain of society such as drinking, sex, and drug use.

The 1890s also saw the dawn of a new subgenre of dark poetry: War poetry. Poems like “Dead Man’s Dump” by Isaac Rosenberg explored the horror of war in an increasingly industrial society. This was the time of the War of the Worlds (H.G. Wells) and poets fascination with the horror of war would continue up to today.

The wheels lurched over sprawled dead

But pained them not, though their bones crunched,

Their shut mouths made no moan.

They lie there huddled, friend and foeman,

Man born of man, and born of woman,

And shells go crying over them

From night till night and now.

The end of the century also brought the first horror films by Georges Méliès, who created some of the earliest “creature features”.

https://youtu.be/32kuXD5k0uU?si=R90BYM0mKa2d\_ZQg

The Gothic and Victorian periods had so many fantastic dark poets, it is difficult to address them all here. From Charles Baudelaire to Lewis Carroll to Mary Shelley and Oscar Wilde, it is worthwhile to explore these poets as inspiration.

Realism & Modernity

**Dream Dust**

Gather out of star-dust

Earth-dust,

Cloud-dust,

And splinters of hail,

One handful of dream-dust

Not for sale.

--Langston Hughes

Important to note is the existence of magazines geared directly toward women. These pulp magazines can be seen as the foundations of most gothic literature and the reason that many women writers found their way into speculative genres. They began far before this time, though. Victorian periodicals contained such fantastical material that it's astounding to me they are not often researched. "There were tales of adventure, of gothic castles or unsurpassable mountains, of husbands losing their lives at sea or becoming blind and c----, of travels into dark woods prowled by thieves and bands of vagabonds. Hardly a month passed without an 'odd' marriage, either sudden or based on mistaken identity," says Jeffrey A. Auerbach ("What They Read: Mid-Nineteenth Century English Women's Magazines and the emergence of a Consumer Culture," in Victorian Periodicals Review.) And although poems were seen as content meant to fill the page in the case of empty space, they were also enjoyed by the public, living alongside these periodical stories.

In the early 1900s, what I call the “pulp poem” emerged. Similar to the penny dreadfuls, pulp magazines were still going strong. The emergence of Weird Tales in 1923 marks an important point on the timeline of horror poetry. The magazine regularly published the poetry of “weird poets” like H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, Clark Ashton Smith, Dorothy Quick, Jack London, Leah Bodline Drake, and more. It is frustrating that although it's easy to find information about short stories published during this time in the pulps, it's harder to find any repository of poems published in these magazines. Poems were often unmarked in the table of contents, or if they were, they simply said "verse" or "poem".

**THE PRICE**

Behind each thing a shadow lies;

Beauty hath e'er its cost:

Within the moonlight-flooded skies

How many stars are lost!--Clark Ashton Smith

You can see the influence of romantic/gothic poetry on the Weird Poets, who often use exclamatory phrases and old-fashioned language to set their poems in a similar tone and atmosphere. Clark Ashton Smith was deemed “The Keats of the Pacific”.

“Weird Tales poetry harkens back to another time, Victorian or older, formal, and most importantly, weird. To compare it to anything modern is silly. It was written to create a chill, to evoke a dark image, to fascinate in the manner of the John Keats’ “La Belle Dame Sans Merci”, Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, or Poe’s “The Raven”. These poems were never trendsetters but as hoary with age as the ghost stories of August Derleth (who wrote a lot of very old-fashioned ghost stories, besides Cthulhu Mythos pastiches). And yet, Marvin Kaye includes one of Derleth’s ghost stories, “Mr. George” (a good one but still, noting new) without any dismissive slights. Horror is an old genre, poetry just as much so.” (G.W. Thomas “The Dark Poets of Weird Tales” https://darkworldsquarterly.gwthomas.org/the-dark-poets-of-weird-tales/)

The publication of dark poetry in SFF (Science Fiction and Fantasy) magazines began the contemporary era of dark poetry. Poets of the 1900s-1940s wrote in response to the Great Depression and World War I and II. The Cthulhu Mythos, created by H.P. Lovecraft, ushered in cosmic and weird horror in short fiction and dark poetry. Whereas dark poetry was previously something that most poets wrote but did not focus on, this period sees dark poets who made writing horror and dark themes their oeuvre.

This was the period when subgenres bloomed. Surrealism turned into magic realism, originating in Latin America with Gabriel García Marquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. In America and beyond, women writers, writers of color, queer writers, and disabled writers slowly found footing in speculative fields. We have now seen a stage of speculative poetry in which every possible topic has been explored, yet poetry is also becoming even more accessible to the everyday reader and has gained popularity beyond just the speculative markets.

Early magazines focused on speculative poetry itself include Kineses (1968-1970), Speculative Poetry Review (1977-1980), Uranus (1978-1984), Treaders of Starlight (1978), Cthulhu Calls, Umbral (1978), Star\*Line (1978-current). Some have called the poetry collection Wine of Wonder by Lilith Lorraine (penname of Mary Maude Dunn Wright) from 1952 the first-ever volume of science fiction poetry.

In the 1950s, confessional poetry often interwove dark themes into its exploration of the inner psyche. Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath have become icons in the dark poetry movement. Confessional poetry is a huge influence on contemporary dark poetry dealing with trauma.

There seems to have been a gathering of speculative poets focused around the forming of the Science Fiction Poetry Association (SFPA) in 1978 by Suzette Haden Elgin, around which many magazines emerged and many authors started publishing books.

Speculative poetry is now mainstream. Authors like Tracy K. Smith, whose book *Life on Mars* won the Pulitzer Prize, have straddled the line between "literary" and speculative markets.

**Demon Lover**

by Dorothy Quick, excerpt, 1953 (in: *Interludes*)

Demon Lover, Demon Lover

Will you never come?

I have walked thrice windershins,

Bitten my own thumb.

I have spilled three drops of blood

And sung the song of shame,

Called to you with longing

Named the dreadful name.