"Free as a Bird". Continued interest in a possible connection between the real-life Eleanor Rigby and the 1966 song led to the deeds for the grave being put up for auction in 2017, along with a Bible that once belonged to Rigby and a handwritten score for the track (subsequently withdrawn) and other items of Beatles memorabilia. Legacy Sociocultural impact and literary appreciation Although "Eleanor Rigby" was far from the first popular song to deal with death and loneliness, according to Ian MacDonald it "came as quite a shock to pop listeners in 1966". It took a bleak message of depression and desolation, written by a famous pop group, with a sombre, almost funeral-like backing, to the number one spot of the pop charts. Richie Unterberger of AllMusic cites the song's focus on "the neglected concerns and fates of the elderly" as "just one example of why the Beatles' appeal reached so far beyond the traditional rock audience". In its inclusion of compositions that departed from the format of standard love songs, Revolver marked the start of a change in the Beatles' core audience, as their young, female-dominated fanbase gave way to a following that increasingly comprised more serious-minded, male listeners. Commenting on the preponderance of young people who, under the influence of drugs such as marijuana and LSD, increasingly afforded films and rock music exhaustive analysis, Mark Kurlansky writes: "Beatles songs were examined like Tennyson's poems. Who was Eleanor Rigby?" The song's lyrics became the subject of study by sociologists, who from 1966 began to view the band as spokesmen for their generation. In 2018, Colin Campbell, professor of sociology at the University of York, published a book-length analysis of the lyrics, titled The Continuing Story of Eleanor Rigby. Writing in the 1970s, however, Roy Carr and Tony Tyler dismissed the song's sociological relevance as academics "rear[ing] a mis-shapen skull", adding: "Though much praised at the time (by sociologists), 'Eleanor Rigby' was sentimental, melodramatic and a blind alley." According to author and satirist Craig Brown, the lyrics to "Eleanor Rigby" have been "the most extravagantly praised" of all the Beatles' songs, "and by all the right people". These include poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Thom Gunn, the last of whom likened the song to W.H. Auden's poem "Miss Gee", and literary critic Karl Miller, who included the lyrics in his 1968 anthology Writing in England Today. In his