Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to HeaneyCalled the "mother of beauty" by Wallace Stevens, death has been perhaps the favorite muse of modern poets. From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find a language of mourning in an age of mass death, religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason, Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most vital to modern poets. Through subtle readings of elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues, Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden, Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the signal contributions to the American family elegy of Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art—in particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial. Grounded in genre theory and in the psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also draw on various historical, formal, and feminist critical approaches. This book will be of interest to anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the history of modern poetry. "Consists of full, intelligent and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary of grief in our time."—Times Literary Supplement |
Common terms and phrases
Adonais aesthetic African-American ambivalence American anger anti-elegiac apostrophe Auden Berryman body Clampitt consolation consolatory corpse critics Daddy daughter dead death death poems Dream Dream Songs dying earlier elegiac tradition elegists elegy's Eliot Emma English Elegy family elegy father feelings female figures Freud funeral genre Ginsberg grief guilt Hardy's Heaney Heaney's Hughes's blues imagination inheritance killed lament Langston Hughes language literary living loss Lowell Lowell's Lycidas lynch lyric male melancholia melancholic Memoriam memory Milton modern elegy mother mourners oedipal once Owen Owen's parents pathetic fallacy poem's poet poet's poetic recalls represents rhetoric Rich Robert Lowell Seamus Heaney seems self-elegies sequence Sexton Shelley social soldier song speaker stanza Stevens's suggests suicide Sylvia Plath Tennyson Thomas Hardy tion traditional elegy trope turns University Press victim violence voice W. B. Yeats W. H. Auden Wallace Stevens Whereas Wilfred Owen woman words writing Yeats Yeats's York