Lamentation of death is the traditional elegiac focus, but in the twentieth century the elegy has become characterized as well by the mourning of other kinds of loss—those personal, familial, romantic, cultural, and philosophical privations and dispossessions that have so greatly shaped the modern sensibility. According to John B. Vickery, a profound elegiac temper is itself the major trait of twentieth-century culture, registered in attitudes ranging from regret, sorrow, confusion, anger, anxiety, doubt, and alienation to outright despair. He transforms our understanding of the elegy and its relation to modernism in The Modern Elegiac Temper. Vickery offers in-depth readings of a broad sampling of British and American poems written from World War I to the present. He considers works of overlooked poets such as Vernon Watkins, George Barker, and Edith Sitwell while also attending to canonical writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. Taking a text-oriented rather than author- or theory-oriented approach, he discusses in turn the personal, love, cultural, and philosophical elegy and shows how war, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and other major historical events influenced poets’ elegiac expressions. By suggesting ways in which the individual-centered concerns of the traditional elegy metamorphose under the depersonalizing lens of high modernism, Vickery reveals the modern elegy to be a finely calibrated instrument for reading and expressing, absorbing and reflecting, the modern temperament.

Traditional English poetic elegists offer both writers and readers hope. After lamenting an individual's death and confronting the mortality of all living things, these poets seek consolation from religion, philosophy, or culture for the inevitability of death. The modern prose elegy, however, follows a different path -- one that determinedly questions all possible resolutions. In The Prose Elegy, John B. Vickery continues the work he began in The Modern Elegiac Temper, which examined the form in British and American poetry. He now considers the works of American and British fiction writers from Henry James to Joan Didion and reveals how the elegy expanded into prose and why it evolved so as to deal not only with death but also with other forms of loss. Focusing on individual works, Vickery explores both the forms the elegy takes throughout the twentieth century and the skeptical and uncertain attitudes of writers struggling to confront the trauma of loss. He offers detailed interpretations of the elegiac components in the works of novelists James Joyce, William Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, and Ernest Hemingway, each of whom forged a distinctive style, as well as chroniclers of a pervasive stoicism, such as Malcolm Lowry and Joan Didion, and writers as nuanced as Sherwood Anderson, F. Scott Fitzgerald, James Agee, and Ford Madox Ford.For these writers, Vickery shows, sorrow intrudes upon the personal, intellectual, and cultural aspects of daily living. By exploring how loss touches each of these areas, their books probe intellectual boundaries and discover new elegiac themes. Truman Capote and John Updike, for example, view memory -- which can disappear quickly -- as inherently sad. They therefore elegize memory. What consoles writers of the modern elegy changes too. In place of Milton's religion or Shelley's philosophy, twentieth-century writers also seek comfort from what also saddens them: family, marriage, and ideas of the self. In The Prose Elegy, Vickery convincingly demonstrates that the elegy remains a dominant mode throughout British and American literature -- with perhaps greater pertinence to our lives than ever before.

In Dying Modern, one of our foremost literary critics inspires new ways to read, write, and talk about poetry. Diana Fuss does so by identifying three distinct but largely unrecognized voices within the well-studied genre of the elegy: the dying voice, the reviving voice, and the surviving voice. Through her deft readings of modern poetry, Fuss unveils the dramatic within the elegiac: the dying diva who relishes a great deathbed scene, the speaking corpse who fancies a good haunting, and the departing lover who delights in a dramatic exit. Focusing primarily on American and British poetry written during the past two centuries, Fuss maintains that poetry can still offer genuine ethical compensation, even for the deep wounds and shocking banalities of modern death. As dying, loss, and grief become ever more thoroughly obscured from public view, the dead start chattering away in verse. Through bold, original interpretations of little-known works, as well as canonical poems by writers such as Emily Dickinson, Randall Jarrell, Elizabeth Bishop, Richard Wright, and Sylvia Plath, Fuss explores modern poetry's fascination with pre- and postmortem speech, pondering the literary desire to make death speak in the face of its cultural silencing.

Scholarship has traditionally characterized elegy as a Eurocentric tradition – a genealogy spanning from ancient Greek pastoral poems via the “English elegy” to English and Anglo-American Modernist contemporary poets. Perry examines how these genealogical constructions operate as a means of framing which guides interpretation. This book argues that they reflect a necropoetics – a system of principles, precepts and techniques which serve to establish and maintain ideas about whose lives are worthy of being mourned publicly and whose losses matter. Examining elegies that challenge questions of whose deaths may be grieved; elegies which articulate the various ways in which certain lives are made precarious and disposable; and elegies which interrogate colonial violence, structures of white power, militarized forms of policing, prison-industrial and military-industrial complexes, Perry explores possibilities for radical new ways of understanding elegy beyond established genealogical frames. This study retheorizes some basic terms of analysis of contemporary US poetry and poetics, critical race and ethnic studies, racial capitalism and contemporary theories of comparative and relational racialization.

This book examines the transition from traditional to modern elegy through a close study of Thomas Hardy’s oeuvre and its commitment to mourning and remembrance. Hardy is usually read as an avowed elegist who writes against the collective forgetfulness typical of the late-Victorian era. But Hardy, as argued here, is dialectically implicated in the very cultural and psychological amnesia that he resists, as her book demonstrates by expanding the corpus of study beyond the spousal elegies (the “Poems of 1912-1913”) to include a wide variety of poems, novels and short stories that deal with bereavement and mourning. Locating the modern aspect of Hardy’s elegiac writing in this ambivalence and in the subversion of memory as unreliable, the book explores the textual moments at which Hardy challenges binary dichotomies such as forgetting vs. remembering, narcissism vs. unselfish commitment, grief vs. betrayal, the work of mourning vs. melancholia, presence vs. absence. The book's analysis allows us to relate Hardy’s elegiac poetics, and particularly his description of the mourner as a writer, to shifting late-Victorian conceptualizations of death, memory, art, science and gender relations.

The essays in Modernism and Mourning examine the work of mourning in modernist literature, or more precisely, its propensity for resisting this work. Drawing from recent developments in the theory and cultural history of mourning, its contributors explore the various ways in which modernist writers repudiate Freud's famous injunction to mourners to work through their grief, endorsing instead a resistant, or melancholic mourning that shapes both their themes and their radical experiments with form. The emerging picture of the pervasive influence of melancholic mourning in modernist literature casts new light on longstanding critical arguments, especially those about the politics of modernism. It also makes clear the pertinence of this literature to the present day, in which the catastrophic losses of 9/11, of retaliatory war, of racially motivated genocide, of the AIDS epidemic, have made the work of mourning a subject of widespread interest and debate. Patricia Rae is Head of the Department of English at Queen's University.

Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 examines contemporary literary expressions of losses that are “lost” on us, inquiring what it means to “lose” loss and what happens when dispossessory experiences go unacknowledged or become inaccessible. Toshiaki Komura analyzes a range of elegiac poetry that does not neatly align with conventional assumptions about the genre, including Wallace Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” Sylvia Plath’s last poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living, Louise Glück’s Averno, and poems written after 9/11. What these poems reveal at the intersection of personal and communal mourning are the mechanism of cognitive myth-making involved in denied grief and its social and ethical implications. Engaging with an assortment of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and psychological theories, Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry elucidates how poetry gives shape to the vague despondency of unrecognized loss and what kind of phantomic effects these equivocal grieving experiences may create.