Samantha Matthews. Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004. ISBN: 0-19-925463-X. Price: £50.

Samantha Matthews’s book Poetical Remains: Poets’ Graves, Bodies, and Books in the Nineteenth Century, is part of a growing body of work on the afterlives of nineteenth-century poets. What distinguishes Matthews’s work is the focus on material culture (what she describes as “the emergent disciplines of book history and death studies,” iii), which encompasses the figurative and literal corpus of the poet. Poetical Remains is concerned with narratives of death: the fate of the corpse generates its own history whilst mortality exerts power over both the living poet and posthumous readings of their work. Out of the “cultural compost” of dying and dead poets grew the Victorian fixation with authorial death, which rendered the poet, as Matthews argues, peculiarly vulnerable to a host of parasites and also provided nourishment for their literary reputation (1). The discussion of Dante Gabriel Rossetti in Chapter 1 is one of the many highlights of this fascinating book. Matthews argues that the interment and subsequent exhumation of Rossetti’s early poems radically challenged Victorian conventions by blurring the boundaries between public mourning and private grief, personal tribute and publication (prominent themes throughout the study). This notorious and well-rehearsed act of desecration is here intriguingly related to displaced anxieties about creative death. Describing the unpublished poems as a “willed creative stillbirth” is one of a number of telling insights that lead into an authoritative discussion of Rossetti’s death and burial at Birchington-on-Sea (21). As Matthews demonstrates here and elsewhere in the study, burial-places are not “mere footnotes to poets’ biographies”; relics and remains were essential components of the literary biography, which fed the growing demand for death-bed memoirs and played a crucial part in determining the posthumous fortunes of the poet (27). Grave disturbance and the “memorial as fetish” are prominent themes of the next chapter, entitled “Resurrecting Burns,” which also incorporates discussions of Shakespeare, Milton, and an engaging reading of Swinburne’s poem “In Sepulcretis” (41). Chapter 3 focuses on the poetess and the mapping of the “female textual body as not terminally dead, but tending always to demise” (77). Matthews argues that Mary Tighe’s life was retrospectively read through the “powerful biographical myth of the consumptive, early-dying poetess,” while her poetry was read as “posthumous remains” (82, 78). Promoting the image of the morbid poetess, Hemans’s poem “The Grave of a Poetess” both commemorates and appropriates Tighe. What Matthews refers to as Hemans’s “backdoor self-reflexivity” has unforeseen consequences as, in the manner of Shelley’s “Adonais,” the epitaph posthumously defines her own reputation (103). Hemans is hardly a passive victim of this myth, however; by challenging perceptions of Tighe in subsequent tributes, she actively engages with and reformulates the process. This chapter demonstrates an extensive knowledge of the subject and provides many careful, detailed readings of the poems; as such, it is a shame that female poets do not figure more prominently elsewhere in the book. The intertwining of Keats’s and Shelley’s fates has long been a subject of critical interest. Chapter 4 adds to existing scholarship in this area through informative discussions of Roman regulations surrounding quarantine, the dialogue between Keats’s and Shelley’s epitaphs in the Protestant Cemetery, and the role played by Joseph Severn in the burial and immediate reception of both poets. Keats’s death and the importance accorded to his grave as “a romanticized but self-contained textual picture,” teeming with the organic life that the poet himself has often been denied in posthumous portraits, is sensitively depicted (122). Likewise, the scene of Shelley’s cremation, “now so layered in narrative that its original outlines are hard to discern,” and Mary Shelley’s influential role in her …