American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to WhitmanU of Minnesota Press - 352 pages The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America, “elegies are poems about being left behind,” writes Max Cavitch. American Elegy is the history of a diverse people’s poetic experience of mourning and of mortality’s profound challenge to creative living. By telling this history in political, psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin, Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton, highlighting their defiance of boundaries—between public and private, male and female, rational and sentimental—and demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to elegy’s adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age, including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney, and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In addition to a major new reading of Whitman’s great elegy for Lincoln, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d,” Cavitch takes up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville’s and Lazarus’s poems following Lincoln’s death. American Elegy offers critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to historical events—such as the American Revolution, Native American removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War—and illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 26
Page v
... Antebellum Elegy 108 4. Elegy's Child : Waldo Emerson 80 and the Price of Generation 143 5. Mourning of the Disprized : African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln 6. Retrievements out of the Night : Whitman and the Future of ...
... Antebellum Elegy 108 4. Elegy's Child : Waldo Emerson 80 and the Price of Generation 143 5. Mourning of the Disprized : African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln 6. Retrievements out of the Night : Whitman and the Future of ...
Page 4
... antebellum figure of Emmeline Grangerford and her " Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots , Dec'd . " Emmeline's brother Buck tells Huck that she could rattle off poetry like nothing . She didn't ever have to stop to think . He said she would ...
... antebellum figure of Emmeline Grangerford and her " Ode to Stephen Dowling Bots , Dec'd . " Emmeline's brother Buck tells Huck that she could rattle off poetry like nothing . She didn't ever have to stop to think . He said she would ...
Page 9
... morbid teenage girl , reminiscent of such short - lived antebellum prodi- gies as Lucretia Maria Davidson . In the poetic corpus of Emmeline Grangerford , Huck's periodic melancholy silences find their profusely verbal INTRODUCTION 9.
... morbid teenage girl , reminiscent of such short - lived antebellum prodi- gies as Lucretia Maria Davidson . In the poetic corpus of Emmeline Grangerford , Huck's periodic melancholy silences find their profusely verbal INTRODUCTION 9.
Page 10
... antebellum America by repeatedly electing to remain aloof from tra- ditional family groups . The singular exception is his sojourn with the Grangerfords , into whose home and daily routine Huck slips without any apparent reluctance ...
... antebellum America by repeatedly electing to remain aloof from tra- ditional family groups . The singular exception is his sojourn with the Grangerfords , into whose home and daily routine Huck slips without any apparent reluctance ...
Page 17
... antebellum period . I have chosen to focus chiefly on the depression years of the late 1830s and 1840s because they were years of such profound social and cultural change , during which many Americans underwent crises of identity and ...
... antebellum period . I have chosen to focus chiefly on the depression years of the late 1830s and 1840s because they were years of such profound social and cultural change , during which many Americans underwent crises of identity and ...
Contents
1 | |
1 Legacy and Revision in EighteenthCentury AngloAmerican Elegy | 33 |
2 Elegy and the Subject of National Mourning | 80 |
Custodianship and Opposition in Antebellum Elegy | 108 |
Waldo Emerson and the Price of Generation | 143 |
African Americans and Elegy from Wheatley to Lincoln | 180 |
Whitman and the Future of Elegy | 233 |
Objects | 286 |
Notes | 295 |
Index | 335 |
Other editions - View all
American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman Max Cavitch No preview available - 2007 |
American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman Max Cavitch No preview available - 2007 |
Common terms and phrases
African ambivalence American elegy American Poetry antebellum Boston broadside Brown Bryant calls Cambridge century child contemporary continuity conventional Cotton Mather cultural dead death dream early eighteenth-century elegiac elegists elegy's Essays example experience expression father feeling figure Franklin Freneau funeral genre genre's George George Moses Horton grief helped Ibid idealization imagination Indian James John lament Leaves of Grass letter Library of America Lilacs Lincoln lines literary literature living loss memory Monimba mourners mourning nature pastoral Philip Freneau Phillis Wheatley poem poem's poet poet's poetic political Prose Puritan Ralph Waldo Emerson readers reading relation satire scene seems sense sentimental Sigourney slave slavery social song sorrow soul spiritual Stockton sublime suggests suicide Thanatopsis thee Thomas thou Threnody tion tradition Traubel University Press verse voice Waldo Emerson Walt Whitman Washington Wheatley's Whitefield William William Cullen Bryant writes wrote York
References to this book
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2009 |