Poets writing in English have long learned to mourn from classical precedents. They have drawn on a tradition of pastoral elegies, which incorporate the dead into the cycles of nature, that runs from Theocritus’ Idylls to John Milton’s “Lycidas” and Percy Shelley’s “Adonais.” They have also found inspiration in a tradition of piercing lyric expressions of loss stretching from Catullus’ 101 (Multas per gentes et multa per aequora vectus) to William Wordsworth’s “Surprised by Joy” and Elizabeth Bishop’s “One Art.” More often writing soliloquies of suffering and consolation than collective songs like the dirge, elegists have discovered that lyric sequences can provide a powerful means of addressing the tensions between grief’s inchoate emotion and social rituals of mourning. Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “In Memoriam A.H.H.,” begun at the news of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam’s death in 1833 and published in 1850, became a pathbreaking example of sustained lyric lament. Thomas Hardy’s searching, ambivalent reflections upon the death of his first wife in his magisterial Poems 1912–1913 later provided an important model for book-length elegiac sequences, among them Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters (1998), with its belated address to Hughes’s first wife, Sylvia Plath, and the Milanese poet Milo De Angelis’s Tema dell’addio (Theme of Farewell), from 2005, a meditation on the early death of De Angelis’s wife, the poet Giovanna Sicari.
In recent years, however, it has been women elegists who, like the Roman epigrammatists of the first century and the British sonneteers of the sixteenth century, are breaking new ground with an established form. Writing most often about deaths within their families, these writers have produced few single or book-length elegies about the demise of public figures; for them, the elegy remains, paradoxically, a public declaration of private emotions. In her prizewinning collection of poems called, simply, Elegy (2007), Mary Jo Bang explores with great anguish the inherently violent and unnatural relation to time experienced by a parent who has lost a child. Here is the conclusion of a poem called “The Role of Elegy”:
What is left but this:
The compulsion to tell.
The transient distraction of ink on cloth
One scrubbed and scrubbed
But couldn’t make less.
Not then, not soon.
Each day, a new caption on the cartoon
Ending that simply cannot be.
One hears repeatedly, the role of elegy is.
“What is left” in the poem are grief’s distinctive valences: the tension between compulsion and distraction; the slippage between commemoration and obliteration; the burden placed on the mourner by the assumptions and demands of others. Bang also negotiates the tension—famously explained by Freud—between melancholia, an endless process of painful repetition, and mourning, with its gradual movement toward closure.
How deeply we might comprehend formal expressions of grief, and whether such comprehension leads to understanding and sympathy, remain open questions. Recent prose memoirs by grieving family members, such as Joan Didion’s harrowing The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), Joyce Carol Oates’s A Widow’s Story (2011) and Meghan O’Rourke’s The Long Goodbye (2011), trace a mourner’s growing self-knowledge as her life is changed and the dead come into clearer, often disconcerting, perspective. These narrative accounts of traumatic loss necessarily repeat and encompass it, acknowledging, if not an afterlife, at least an aftermath. Writers of recent poetic elegies, however, do not rely on this kind of narrative form alone, if at all. In the past year four women poets have joined Bang in publishing book-length elegies of marked formal originality: Susan Howe, with That This; Gjertrud Schnackenberg, and her Heavenly Questions; Anne Carson, with Nox; and C.D. Wright, One With Others. Carson mourns a brother; Wright, a friend; and Howe and Schnackenberg, husbands. What is perhaps most striking about these books is the formal singularity of each poet’s lament. Schnackenberg adheres to a relentless iambic pentameter throughout a six-poem sequence, whereas Howe, Carson and Wright each set the sung emotions of lyric against prose passages, textual fragments, visual images and even research notes.