High Quality Content by WIKIPEDIA articles! Obituary poetry, in the broad sense, includes any poem that commemorates a person or group of people's death: an elegy. In its stricter sense, though, it refers to a genre of popular verse or folk poetry that had its greatest popularity in the nineteenth century, especially in the United States of America. The genre consists largely of sentimental narrative verse that tells the story of the demise of its typically named subjects, and seeks to console their mourners with descriptions of their happy afterlife. The genre achieved its peak of popularity in the decade of the 1870s. While usually full chiefly of conventional pious sentiments, the obituary poets in in one sense continue the program of meditations on death begun by the eighteenth century graveyard poets, such as Edward Young's Night Thoughts, and as such continue one of the themes that went into literary Romanticism.