LISTICLE 

Poems that Haunt Us:
6 Spooky Verses

REBECCA CHAPMAN

It’s that spooky time of year, dear Poets, so light those candles, curl up, and let your darkness out to play as we discuss the poems that haunt us—poems about haunting that have grabbed hold of literary consciousness and refused to let go ever since. 

Let’s begin with the assumption that ghosts are real and we, all of us, have always known that. If you're resistant to that idea, we can at least agree that haunting has been a useful metaphor for poets throughout history. The way many poets represent ghosts changed in the nineteenth century, however, when things became personal. Poets started practicing what’s been called in literary history “the internalization of spirits”—the trope of finding ghostly terror within the poetic speaker’s internal word rather than the external world. Poets widely follow this model today.

Whether real or not, ghosts have long represented our shadows and what doesn’t fit as it should, as it’s supposed to. Somewhere between alive and dead, there and not, material and ethereal, hauntings remind us of the remainder, what’s left after we’ve done our best to order our fears and anxieties into clean systems of meaning. Specters take the shape of parts of us that feel like too much. It’s that excess that haunts us, and ghosts are the literary devices that allow haunting to take hold…