author
Robert Blair
1699–1746
Best remembered for the haunting poem The Grave, this Scottish writer and minister helped shape the dark, reflective mood that later became known as graveyard poetry. His most famous work stayed in readers' minds long after his short life ended, and was later illustrated by William Blake.
1 Audiobook
The Poetical Works of Beattie, Blair, and Falconer With Lives, Critical Dissertations, and Explanatory Notes
by James Beattie, Robert Blair, William Falconer
About the author
Born in Edinburgh on April 17, 1699, he became a Scottish poet as well as a Church of Scotland minister. He studied at the University of Edinburgh and in the Netherlands, and in 1731 he was appointed minister at Athelstaneford in East Lothian.
His lasting reputation rests on The Grave, a long blank-verse poem first published in 1743. The poem's meditation on death and the afterlife made it one of the notable works linked with the eighteenth-century "graveyard" tradition, and its later illustrated edition by William Blake helped keep it widely known.
He died at Athelstaneford on February 4, 1746. Although he is remembered mainly for a single poem, that poem gave him a lasting place in Scottish literary history.