The Gothic genre dominated literature from its conception, the publication of The Castle of Otranto (by Horace Walpole in 1764), to the culminating Gothic decadence of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The genre, which accentuated the melancholic dramas of the Jacobites drew many of its intense images from the graveyard poets Gray and Thompson. The landscape of the Gothic consisted of vast dark forests whose vegetation bordered on excess, concealed ruins with dark rooms, monasteries and a melancholy, forlorn character who excels at the lute. A fabled specter or perhaps the Bleeding Nun from Lewis's The Monk were images often sought after by readers who fell victim to the supernatural influences of these books. The impact of these novels is evident in the landscape of contemporary poets such as Louise Gluck, especially in the poem "Lost Love" which accentuates the sentimental in relationship to the enlarged event of death. Gothic overtones permeate the language of the poem evoking a supernatural terror that manifests itself in the form of the vampire. The same metaphor shapes the Gothic landscape in Sylvia Plath's poem "Edge" where perfection is consummate in death and the vampire is the means that accomplishes that death. What both poets find in Gothic idealism, they found lacking in an unsentimental and unforgiving world. Gothic literature as a movement was a disappointment to the idealistic romantic poets for the sentimental character (idealized by Mrs. Ann Radcliffe) could not transcend into reality. However, for the contemporary poet it provides a vehicle to examine the inability of the individual to dismiss the sentimental and the supernatural.

The influence of the Gothic novel upon contemporary poetry is evident from the Gothic motif that has descended from such writers as Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis and Clara Reeve. They derived terror by rendering the world as a fallen environment where characters possessed a tired notion of mortality. Death in the Gothic sense is a melancholic refuge from the putrefaction of the fallen world. The world is not only fallen, but is in the process of falling. Ruinous castles and monasteries are scattered in the thick tangled forests, a source of delightful solitude and a haven to the pursued victims. The Gothic landscape is lush and overgrown with wild trees and odorous flowers. It is full of excesses and temptation. The choice of good and evil lies within the hero who is trapped between two seemingly horrid positions. Sentimentality is often the result of a naive, isolated upbringing where they preach emotional idealism against the fallen world, whose unmerciful hand is ever raised against the weak. The supernatural thrives in Gothic tales, a specter warns the virtuous or torments a sinner to recompense. The Gothic genre culminated in decadence eventually laid the groundwork for many of today's poetical voices and metaphors. Gothic elements open channels which enable the writer to explore both the supernatural and sentimental thought in the context of today's society. Much of today's contemporary poetry illustrates the commingling of Gothic and modern thought. Louise Gluck in her poem "Lost Love" examines the relationship of the dead with those living. Sylvia Plath in her poem "Edge" examines the perfection attained in death. Yet both poets also thread a common metaphor through both poems that of the vampire, or the ability for the dead to take life from the living.

The use of the Gothic in contemporary poetry is evident in the poem "Lost Love" by Louise Gluck. Gothic elements within the poem serve as a vehicle that enable the poem to move toward sentimentalism and away from the reasonable. "Lost Love" is an elegy evolving around a concentrated event that of the death of a sister. Death, a common Gothic motif accentuates emotional idealism glorifying the rationality of the emotions rather than reason. By accentuating the emotions surrounding the death of her sister, Gluck could invoke the supernatural in order to rationalize the selfish motives encompassed by the poem. The theme which threads the poem is the predominate notion that the dead have power over those living. The spirit is able to transcend the bounds of death to "spend" another's life. The poem opens with a view of Gluck's sister buried in the depths of a sepulcher, "My sister spent a whole life in the earth." The sister, although dead can spend a life in the earth that surrounds her. However, she spent not her own life, but that of her motherÕs life. Gluck explains,

The poetry of Sylvia Plath is engrossed in Gothic idealism and overtones. As in "Lost Love," Plath explores the depths of death in her poem "Edge." The Gothic landscape permeates the "Edge" as "the moon has nothing to be sad about, / Staring from her hood of bone . . . / Her blacks crackle and drag."(18,20) Nature is deep and nocturnal, ". . . a rose close when the garden / Stiffens and odours bleed / From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower."(14-16) Beyond the Gothic figures of nature in Plath, the first line of "Edge" opens the reader to the face of death. "The woman is perfected./ Her dead / Body wears the smile of accomplishment."(1-3) Plath sees in death the perfection that is unattainable in life. It is through the Gothic motif of Death that idealism is attainable. The Gothic allows an unattainable concept that of perfection to be within oneÕs own power, the ability to die. Perfection lies in and through death and is accomplished in dark silence, where the supernatural lives. Plath sculpts a verbal sarcophagus depicting a woman stretched out in her perfection with "each dead child coiled, a white serpent, / one at each little / pitcher of milk, now empty."(9-11) Here Plath starts weaving the thread of the supernatural through the poem with the introduction of the vampire imagery. The dead children stretched upon their dead mother one at each breast. The breast being a source of life, which each life drank from, sucking from their mother her life. The sarcophagus now shows the breasts "empty, / She has folded / Them Back into her body as petals."(12-14) She in her perfection is no longer the victim of vampirism. For in "Edge" the vampires upon her breasts are the means that accomplish the death wherein she became perfected. She is no longer an object to be acted upon. This is pure escapism. Death as an escape raises the victim to sainthood in that they have escaped the fallen world for a world of rest. Plath in her own life longed for an ideal place, as so many Gothic novels illustrate where the sentimental and supernatural have a home. Plath also used the Gothic influence to express as Gluck did her inability to dismiss the notions of the sentimental and the supernatural of this life. They do have a place in Plath's "Edge" where Gothic idealism mingles with modern life.

The Gothic movement which began as early as 1764 with the publication of The Castle of Otranto thrived throughout the end of the eighteenth century and is still felt strongly in literature today. Contemporary writers such as Louise Gluck and Sylvia Plath continue to draw language and metaphors from this often forgotten genre. Gothic idealism which often encompassed the sentimental and the supernatural are powerful images that writers draw upon today to expresses ideas and emotions that seem lost in modern society. Louise Gluck's poem "Lost Love" and Sylvia Plath's poem "Edge" use the Gothic as a vehicle to explore and express the sentimentalism of death and its means of perfection. Both poets find in Gothic idealism the peace and forgiveness that the world finds arachic. They also draw upon the supernatural metaphor of the vampire to convey the nearness of the grave to those who survive. For Gluck the dead still interact with the living as do so many specters in Gothic novels. Ghosts or spirits mingle with those living for their own progression outside of death. Similarly Plath finds in death perfection that is elusive in life. Vampires who manifest themselves as children can no longer suck the life out of her, but they are the means to attain that death, that is perfection sought for so often.