While Google-booking for something entirely different, I came across Richard Dagley's Death's Doings (2 vols.), a nineteenth-century anthology of poetry written in response to Dagley's etchings of Death doing its thing in various situations. Academics might take this one to heart:
Strictly speaking, Dagley's Deaths aren't dancing, but this is still very much in the tradition of the danse macabre, with average joes (and others) running into Death at the most inopportune moments. (More examples here and here.) The poems themselves are...not the most thrilling example of early nineteenth-century English poetry you'll ever come across, but there are some recognizable names in there, including L.E.L., Felicia Hemans, "Barry Cornwall," Robert Montgomery, and the didactic novelist Barbara Hofland.
That's a fascinating find, but didn't danse macabre go out of fashion in, like, the 16th c.?
Posted by: tatiana.larina | July 06, 2011 at 07:42 AM