SOURCE: Wicker, Cecil V. “Young as Romanticist” and “Young's Melancholy and His Relation to the Graveyard School.” In Edward Young and the Fear of Death: A Study of Romantic Melancholy. 11-22; 23-27. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1952.

In the following essays, Wicker argues that Young strove to be original in his works and that he treated the melancholy of his day in a new fashion that led to Romanticism. This Romanticism can be seen in the Graveyard tradition, of which Young was one of the founders.

Young as Romanticist

What this humour is, or whence it proceeds, how it is engendered in the body, neither Galen, nor any old writer, hath sufficiently discussed, as Jacchinus thinks.

Burton's Anatomy of Melancholy

Possibly the most helpful way to regard romanticism,¹ at least insofar as its eighteenth-century roots are concerned, is to accept Draper's view² that the social basis of...