The Poetry of Loss

Romantic and Contemporary Elegies

Judith Harris

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2023
• Print ISBN: 9781032009490
• eBook ISBN: 9781000870497
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies presents a renewed look at elegy as a long-standing tradition in the literature of loss, exploring recent shifts in the continuum of these memorial poems. This volume investigates the tensions arising in elegiac formulations of grief through detailed analyses of seminal poets, including Wordsworth, Keats, and Plath, using psychoanalytic precepts to reconceptualize consolation through poetic strategies of inner representation and what it might mean for personal and collective experiences of loss. Tracing the development of elegy beyond extant readings, this volume addresses contemporary constructs of mourning and their attendant polemics within the wider culture as extensions of elegiac longings and the tendency to refuse consolation and cede to the endlessness of grief. Furthermore, this book concludes that contemporary elegies break with conventions of poetic structure and expression; rather than the poets seeking resolution to grief through compensation, they often find themselves dwelling within the loss rather than externalizing and transcending it. The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies examines these developing psychoanalytic concepts pertaining to a poetics of loss, providing readers with a new appreciation of mourning culture and contemporary attitudes towards grief.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Elegiac Language and Expression of Grief
• 1 Psychoanalytic Theories of Mourning and the Failure to Mourn
• 2 The Lost Child in Wordsworth’s Elegies and John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss
• 3 Loss and Beauty: Keats’s Women and the “Ode to Psyche”
• 4 A Consolation of Beauty, Grief, and Sadness in Jane Kenyon’s Poems
• 5 Sylvia Plath’s Mock and Self-Elegies: A Kleinian Reading of “Edge”
• 6 A Father’s Grief: Elegy and Counter-Tradition in Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel A Poem
• 7 An Inheritance of Terror: Postmemory and Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Second-Generation Jews after the Holocaust
• 8 The Canticles of Grief: Contemporary Elegies and the Limits of Mourning
• 9 The Literature of Loss: Elegies as a Therapeutic Strategy for Coping with Grief
• Conclusion
• Index