Wordsworth: ‘Upon Epitaphs’

 William Wordsworth made a claim about epitaphs. The idea of an epitaph presumes some kind of monument to the dead. And the impulse to build monuments presumes a belief in immortality.

The claim is intriguing, but I don’t think it’s true.

I also don’t think it matters. But Wordsworth did. He spent a lot of time with an argument showing that all that effort would simply be unthinkable without a belief in immortality. I think he begs the question.

I read “Upon Epitaphs” because Charles Lamb admired it when it was published in The Friend in 1810. I then found two other essays on epitaphs in Wordsworth’s Prose Works.

I kept reading because I’m interested in these questions: What were people in earlier times thinking when they made cemeteries, tombstones and other monuments? Why, in an increasingly secular society, do we still do it? Why do we think a cemetery is a good use of scarce land?

Wordsworth at least takes a stab at it with his idea about immortality.

But he’s mainly interested in the aesthetics of the epitaph. Again, he has something interesting to stay.

While Europeans collected their monuments in churchyards, the ancient Greeks tended to put theirs at crossroads. (It’s why so many of those old epitaphs begin with a salutation like, “Pause, traveler!”)

Wordsworth thought the aesthetics of epigraphs depended on telling the story of a person within the limits of that short pause. He wanted real grief and natural descriptions, rather than “poetic” languages. His criticism of Alexander Pope is cutting.

It’s good advice on writing. But it seems to me humanity be better served if we got out of the monuments business. 

• Source: William Wordsworth’s essay “Upon Epitaphs” was originally published The Friend, Feb. 22, 1810 and collected in The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, ed. by the Rev. Alexander B. Grosart; London: Edward Moxon, Son, and Co., 1876. The essay is in Vol. 2, along with two others on similar topics: “The Country Church-yard, and Critical Examination of Ancient Epitaphs” and “Celebrated Epitaphs Considered.” Project Gutenberg has them here:

https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16550/16550-h/16550-h.htm#II_UPON_EPITAPHS