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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... George Washington,” American Literature 75, no. 2 (2003): 247—74. Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or ...
... George Washington,” American Literature 75, no. 2 (2003): 247—74. Copyright 2007 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or ...
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... George Washington at the turn of the nineteenth century— elegies ranging from anonymous newspaper verses to poems by established literary figures like David Humphreys, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown. Recalling the imperative ...
... George Washington at the turn of the nineteenth century— elegies ranging from anonymous newspaper verses to poems by established literary figures like David Humphreys, Susanna Rowson, and Charles Brockden Brown. Recalling the imperative ...
Page 18
... George White, Joshua McCarter Simpson, Grace Greenwood, Daniel Alexander Payne, Julia Ward Howe, George Moses Horton, and Frances Harper—demonstrates elegy's cultural importance to their critique of patriotic propaganda, while revealing ...
... George White, Joshua McCarter Simpson, Grace Greenwood, Daniel Alexander Payne, Julia Ward Howe, George Moses Horton, and Frances Harper—demonstrates elegy's cultural importance to their critique of patriotic propaganda, while revealing ...
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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 |