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
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Page 1
... traditions of resignation. In their figures of death, elegies seek to apprehend the ultimate, most unknowable condition of privacy, while pointing, in their language of loss, toward the sheer commonality of human experience. Elegy is a ...
... traditions of resignation. In their figures of death, elegies seek to apprehend the ultimate, most unknowable condition of privacy, while pointing, in their language of loss, toward the sheer commonality of human experience. Elegy is a ...
Page 2
... tradition became increasingly attenuated under countervailing pressures of migration and encounter, pluralization and secularization, war and independence. Yet Americans did not stop writing elegies. During the early and mid-eighteenth ...
... tradition became increasingly attenuated under countervailing pressures of migration and encounter, pluralization and secularization, war and independence. Yet Americans did not stop writing elegies. During the early and mid-eighteenth ...
Page 3
... tradition, but also because it simultaneously and variously begins to resist, revise, and further recontextualize received emplotments of vocation and inheritance from the classical-European tradition. The history of American elegy is ...
... tradition, but also because it simultaneously and variously begins to resist, revise, and further recontextualize received emplotments of vocation and inheritance from the classical-European tradition. The history of American elegy is ...
Page 10
... traditional family groups. The singular exception is his sojourn with the Grangerfords, into whose home and daily ... tradition of versified lament is a hallmark of his authentic feeling as well as of his characteristic evasion of ...
... traditional family groups. The singular exception is his sojourn with the Grangerfords, into whose home and daily ... tradition of versified lament is a hallmark of his authentic feeling as well as of his characteristic evasion of ...
Page 13
... tradition of neglect and distantiation has been considerably refined since Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel ( ), proclaimed that the “classical poetic genres revived by the Renaissance had lost their ...
... tradition of neglect and distantiation has been considerably refined since Leslie Fiedler, in Love and Death in the American Novel ( ), proclaimed that the “classical poetic genres revived by the Renaissance had lost their ...
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
American authority become begins body Boston Bryant calls century child collective Complete continuity conventional criticism cultural dead death dream early effect elegiac elegists elegy Emerson England Essays example experience expression father feeling figure final funeral further future genre George grief hand heart helps human idealization imagination Indian individual John kind laments later Leaves less letter Lilacs Lincoln lines literary literature living loss lost means memory mourners mourning nature never night object ofthe once particular poem poet poetic poetry political practice present published Puritan question readers reading references relation remains says scene seeks seems sense slave social song sorrow soul speak suggests suicide Thomas thought tion tradition turn University Press verse voice Waldo Washington Wheatley Whitman writes wrote York
References to this book
Misery's Mathematics: Mourning, Compensation, and Reality in Antebellum ... Peter Balaam No preview available - 2009 |