April is National Poetry Month.  Celebrate by reading more about the notable poets buried at Mount Auburn and enjoying some poems about Mount Auburn and its residents!

READ POETRY

Mt. Auburn Memorial was a weekly newspaper that discussed many topics related to Mount Auburn.  The eight page publication was produced by Mount Auburn’s gatekeeper, Truman Hopson (T.H.) Safford, and his son DeForest (D.F.) Safford.  The first edition was published on June 15, 1859 – features included poems, stories, news from other cemeteries, advertisements for local services, horticulture notes, record of interments, memorials to notable residents and more.  View scans of poems printed in Mt. Auburn Memorial.

Poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti was so inspired by a visit to friend and fellow poet Robert Creeley’s grave at Mount Auburn, that he wrote two poems about his experience at the Cemetery.  ”In the Creeley family plot in Mount Auburn Cemetery, Boston, just off the Tulip Path, there were already thirteen Creeleys and seven related Lauries with their names incised in a twelve-foot stone pillar, and poet Robert Creeley himself now just buried here still awaiting a gravestone under a Douglas Fir and a European Beech whose blossoms this windy wet April 2006 wave in the wrought air above him…” Read more.

Before Poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow came to be buried at Mount Auburn in 1882, he experienced the deaths of several close family and friends. Longfellow, known as the poet of “Hope, Home and History,” celebrated his own experiences—both good and bad—in poetical verse.  Read a few poems that Longfellow wrote in memory of friends and family who are also buried at Mount Auburn.

LEARN MORE ABOUT THE POETS OF MOUNT AUBURN

Flip through Women Poets of the 19th & 20th Century at Mount Auburn or The Poets of Mount Auburn Cemetery – two brochures about poets buried at Mount Auburn – including Thomas Bailey Aldrich, Gamaliel Bradford, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Oliver Wendell Holmes, David McCord, Louise Chandler Moulton, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Amy Lowell, James Russell Lowell, Maria White Lowell, Frances Sargent Osgood, Fanny Parnell and Nathaniel Parker Willis among others!