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 35
Page 3
... begins to resist , revise , and fur- ther recontextualize received emplotments of vocation and inheritance from the classical - European tradition.1 op- The history of American elegy is difficult to trace because it is itself part of ...
... begins to resist , revise , and fur- ther recontextualize received emplotments of vocation and inheritance from the classical - European tradition.1 op- The history of American elegy is difficult to trace because it is itself part of ...
Page 12
... begins : “ In a fair valley — oh , how long ago , how long ago ! ” In this val- ley , “ [ s ] hut from the troubled world , a nameless hamlet drowsed , " and , near this hamlet , a temple . The temple is Olivia , projected far back in ...
... begins : “ In a fair valley — oh , how long ago , how long ago ! ” In this val- ley , “ [ s ] hut from the troubled world , a nameless hamlet drowsed , " and , near this hamlet , a temple . The temple is Olivia , projected far back in ...
Page 13
... begin : with Walt Whitman's “ When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd ” ( 1865 ) . It does so in order both to foreground the earlier elegiac tradition ob- scured by that poem's reception history , and also to refocus attention on the ...
... begin : with Walt Whitman's “ When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd ” ( 1865 ) . It does so in order both to foreground the earlier elegiac tradition ob- scured by that poem's reception history , and also to refocus attention on the ...
Page 17
... begin with child elegies by Lydia Sigourney , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , and other poets who tend to measure the loss of children in conventional terms . Then I offer an extended analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's " Threnody , " his ...
... begin with child elegies by Lydia Sigourney , Henry Wadsworth Longfellow , and other poets who tend to measure the loss of children in conventional terms . Then I offer an extended analysis of Ralph Waldo Emerson's " Threnody , " his ...
Page 20
... begin- ning of the twentieth century , Benedetto Croce painted genre criticism ( especially its anatomizing and classifying activities ) as the mortal enemy of literature : “ division annihilates the work . . . turns the living being ...
... begin- ning of the twentieth century , Benedetto Croce painted genre criticism ( especially its anatomizing and classifying activities ) as the mortal enemy of literature : “ division annihilates the work . . . turns the living being ...
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 |