Main description:

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.

Contents:

Introduction: The Elegiac Language and Expression of Grief

CHAPTER ONE: Psychoanalytic Theories of Mourning and the Failure to Mourn

CHAPTER TWO: The Lost Child in Wordsworth's Elegies and John Bowlby's Attachment and Loss

CHAPTER THREE: Loss and Beauty: Keats's Women and the "Ode to Psyche"

CHAPTER FOUR: A Consolation of Beauty, Grief, and Sadness in Jane Kenyon's Poems

CHAPTER FIVE: Sylvia Plath's Mock and Self-Elegies: A Kleinian Reading of "Edge"

CHAPTER SIX: A Father's Grief: Elegy and Counter-Tradition in Edward Hirsch's Gabriel

CHAPTER SEVEN: An Inheritance of Terror: Postmemory and Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Second-Generation Jews after the Holocaust

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Canticles of Grief: Contemporary Elegies and the Limits of Mourning

CHAPTER NINE: The Literature of Loss: Elegies as a Therapeutic Strategy for Coping with Grief

Conclusion