This fascinating monograph offers a multilayered exploration of the aftermath of the deaths of prominent British poets, from Robert Burns in 1796 to Alfred Tennyson in 1892. Central to the argument is the interplay between the three elements identified in the title: grave sites and monuments, the image and treatment of physical bodies, and the associated literary texts, both the works of the dead poets themselves and those inspired by their deaths.

Samantha Matthews starts in an apt, if disturbing, manner, bringing all these strands immediately together by discussing the exhumation in 1869 of the body of Elizabeth Siddall to recover a manuscript of poems by her husband Dante Gabriel Rossetti, which he had consigned to her coffin in his intense grief and guilt following her death in 1862. Actual books also feature prominently in some other cases discussed, notably the copy of John Keats's poems found in Percy Bysshe Shelley's pocket after his drowned body was washed up on the shores of Tuscany and the text of Shakespeare's Cymbeline buried with Tennyson in Westminster Abbey.

Links between bodies and books are not always so direct and explicit, but Matthews consistently brings them into focus by means of an impressive depth and range of research. After the initial case study of Rossetti, the organization of the book is a broadly chronological one. Discussion of Burns centers on the development of poet's grave, and the exhumations of his body in 1815, 1834, and 1857 against the backdrop of his burgeoning literary reputation. An interlinked study of Mary Tighe (d. 1810) and Felicia Hemans (d. 1835) discusses two poets associated not only by their gender but also by Hemans's literary evocations of Tighe's grave at Inistioge, County Kilkenny. A second natural pairing is that of Keats (d. 1821) and Shelley (d. 1822), associated by their early deaths in Italy and by interment in the Protestant cemetery in Rome. Matthews is particularly compelling in discussing their respective epitaphs, Keats's embittered anonymity, and the inspired selection for Shelley of lines from Shakespeare's Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.” A further premature poetic death was that of Thomas Hood in 1845, which leads Matthews into an intriguing analysis of the tensions surrounding literary and physical memorialization of a man of popular sympathies interred in the inescapably staid surroundings of Kensal Green Cemetery.

Early death was in itself part of the mystique surrounding many nineteenth-century poets, but Matthews's three remaining case studies, William Wordsworth (d. 1850), Robert Browning (d. 1889), and Tennyson (d. 1892) all lived out the full biblical span. Browning and Tennyson, moreover, continued to publish poetry in their old age, with Browning's Asolando coincidentally published on the very day of his death. The literary inactivity of Wordsworth's later years was obscured by the posthumous publication of The Prelude, largely written several decades earlier. With these three poets, the location of burial is explored as a major historical and literary issue. Wordsworth was allowed to remain at Grasmere with his family and among his beloved Lake District mountains. Browning and Tennyson, however, were both successfully claimed for Westminster Abbey, despite the former's death in Italy, and Lady Tennyson's personal preference for burial at Freshwater, “the dear place where his happiest days have been passed” (293).

Matthews's analysis of prominent literary deaths valuably complements and extends the account of political, royal, and other deaths in John Wolffe's Great Deaths (Oxford, 2000). Poets, like novelists and artists, but unlike most soldiers, statesmen, and royalty, left behind them tangible achievements of their creative lives with a continuing but variable appeal, which ensured that their commemoration was a dynamic and complex process. Whereas, as Tennyson himself appreciated, the duke of Wellington's continuing reputation depended on enduring public reverence for his name and awareness of his place in history, posterity could continue to read and discover afresh a poet's own words. Matthews's literary perspective is also illuminating in discussing the language of texts, not only the poems themselves, but also seemingly unprepossessing newspaper reports.

It is instructive to reflect on the varied dimensions of patriotism illuminated by the aftermaths of both poetical and nonpoetical deaths. For Keats, Shelley, and Browning, as for Gordon and Livingstone, death abroad was perceived to carry particular connotations of loneliness and even alienation, and the impulse to bring the body home, or else to mourn its continuing exile, was a strong one. For Wordsworth, as for Disraeli, burial in a rural churchyard was accompanied by powerful evocations of the beauty of the English countryside. The “pantheonization” of Browning and Tennyson at Westminster reflected the later Victorian resurgence in the status of the Abbey as a national cemetery, also containing, for example, the remains of Palmerston, Livingstone, Darwin, and Gladstone. Meanwhile, north of the border, the cult of Burns was an important strand in the nineteenth-century resurgence of Scottish national consciousness.

Two criticisms can be noted. First, it is unfortunate that the organization of the book in line with dates of death means that substantive discussion of Tennyson only comes at the end. Although he did not die until 1892, publications much earlier in his life, notably In Memoriam (1850) and the Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington (1852), had had a profound impact on cultural perceptions of death. Second, religious aspects of poetic deaths could have been explored with more depth and subtlety. In particular Matthews tends to presuppose a conventional narrative of increasing secularization. However, the evidence does not really support this view: the conspicuous religiosity of responses to Browning's and Tennyson's deaths contrasts strikingly with the more secular aftermath of those of Burns, Keats, and Shelley in the earlier part of her period. Matthews's achievement in this book is a very substantial one, both in the context of her own discipline, and in contributing wide-ranging insights to the interdisciplinary study of responses to death.