Blood Ties: The Intertwined First Mention of Vampires in Poetry and Fiction

Abstract

The common understanding of how vampires entered fiction was by way of poetry; the poems romanticized the vampire which fiction later picked up on. However, this is a limited view of how vampires entered stories. An earlier mention of vampires in fiction led to the first vampire poetry, over 275 years ago. This paper investigates the first poetry to mention vampires, and how the earlier fiction directly influenced it.