I hope you don't mind my sharing a personal story...
I visit a lot of cemeteries. I insist this is not because of some morbid affectation on my part. The truth is, many of the people that I admire happen to be dead, often by well over a century. My interest with these dead figures varies, of course, from deep and sincere respect to a passing curiosity. Nonetheless, I always enjoy adding to my list of visited graves.
In the past few years, I have visited the graves of Bronson Alcott, Washington Allston, William Ellery Channing (both the first and the second), E. E. Cummings, Richard Henry Dana (Sr.), Ralph Waldo Emerson, Thomas Dunn English, Edward Everett, James T. Fields, Benjamin Franklin, William Lloyd Garrison, Sarah Josepha Hale, Oliver Wendell Holmes (Sr.), Julia Ward Howe, Washington Irving, Harriet Jacobs, George Lippard, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, H. P. Lovecraft, James Russell Lowell, Frances Sargent Osgood, Francis Parkman, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Edgar A. Poe, Paul Revere, Gilbert Stuart, Thomas Sully, Charles Sumner, Bayard Taylor, Sarah Helen Whitman, Nathaniel Parker Willis, and Joseph Emerson Worcester - just to name a few off the top of my head.
Usually, my reaction is pretty standard: I'm excited to come as close to meeting this person as possible (or sometimes just relieved I've finally found it after hours of traipsing through a muddy cemetery).
But last weekend, as I made my way through Brooklyn's historic Green-Wood Cemetery to find the burial plot of Rufus W. Griswold, something else came over me. There, in the long shadow cast by the memorial to telegraph inventor Samuel Morse, I looked down at a completely unmarked grave for one of the most influential - yet controversial - literary figures of the mid-19th-century. No massive monument (like that of Poe) was left for him after fans came to his posthumous support. Not even a humble one, like that of Henry David Thoreau. No tokens were left at his grave, unlike the many trinkets left for Emily Dickinson. No stones or pinecones or pennies like so many other respected men of the past receive at their final resting place. A tree had overgrown into Griswold's spot and I imagined how its roots enveloped a forgotten coffin or, worse, broke through it to disturb the corpse.
It occurred to me as I stood there in the biting April wind that I might well be the only one who knows that Rufus Wilmot Griswold, the Reverend Doctor who had helped shape American poetry in the 1840s, was buried at lot 14668 in section 32. I thought it appropriate that this man was laid to rest on "Thorn Path" after his years as a scorned enemy or, at best, a fearsomely influential bully to whom respect was owed, even unwillingly. For all his faults, for all his mistakes, for his legacy as a universally-hated man, no one whose name was once so worthwhile should ever be forgotten so easily. As I stood over that bed of pine needles, I wondered who besides me has come to pay respects in the past 150 years. Perhaps I was the first since the hole was first closed over him. Worse, I feared I might well be the last. In another 150 years, what will people say of Griswold? Who will remember him? Who mourns him?
My guess is that all biographers, amidst their research and writing, always believe their subject is the most important one in the world. All other notable people have some connection to him, and he seems to pop up in everyday conversations. Such is probably true with me. I accept the bad aspects of Griswold, for which I would never apologize, but I also acknowledge his importance in his lifetime. I am an admitted Poeist above all else - but I don't feel ashamed that I shed a tear for Dr. Griswold, six feet above his forgotten remains, buried alone - without family, without friends.
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
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