LAUSR

of narrative emplotment, whereby the site generates an increasingly powerful (if paradoxical) internal narrative logic that diminishes again due to mass tourism, poetry’s weakened cultural status, and closure to new burials and memorials. This self-assured contribution to British studies is nonetheless bookended by discussions of American responses: writings by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the nineteenth century and the late-twentieth-century construction of the American Poets’ Corner, in the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, New York. Prendergast’s gesture demonstrates the “temporal and geographical reach” ofWestminster Abbey’s Poets’ Corner (x), but also suggests anxiety that American readers will not fully grant the significance of such a “profoundly English space” (x). Engagement with scholarship in the field is good, though there are omissions, notably Paul Westover’sNecromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750–1860 (2012). One might also take issue with loose descriptions of Poets’ Corner as “essentially a graveyard” (xii) or “cemetery’ (xiii), terms denoting outdoor burial sites, when its character as an intramural burial place (within the church walls) is a key factor in its declining modern status, an anachronism at odds with the prevalent anti-monumental, back-to-nature aesthetic for poets’ graves. Prendergast argues with energy, presents his case with critically discriminating use of textual evidence, and in the main writes clear and readable prose; Poetical Dust is an engagingly lively account of a potentially dusty subject. Occasionally, though, it falls into a vein of verbal impressionism and approximation that exceeds the judicious qualification necessitated by presenting contentious or speculative interpretations or describing quasi-mystical affect. The use of “poetical” to mean “of poets”—hence a “poetical graveyard” (3)—casts a speciously figurative aura over factual statements; a poet’s corpse is far from “poetical.” The formula “a kind of ” is a compulsive stylistic tic: Within a few sentences we are told that “This inscription would seem to be a kind of elegy,” “We move ... through the poem as a kind of narrative,” it laments “a kind of lost former self,” and Robert Hauley is “a kind of ‘martyr’” (35). The reader might legitimately ask, “what kind exactly?” The book would be better—and a couple of pages shorter—if every redundant “a kind of ”was cut. However, this quibble does not diminish Prendergast’s achievement. Poetical Dust is the authoritative modern account of Poets’ Corner.