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 viii
... David ; my sister Elizabeth and her husband , Kevin ; my friends Maggie Robbins and James Meyer ; and especially Matthew Parr . INTRODUCTION Leaving Poetry Behind What living and buried speech is VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
... David ; my sister Elizabeth and her husband , Kevin ; my friends Maggie Robbins and James Meyer ; and especially Matthew Parr . INTRODUCTION Leaving Poetry Behind What living and buried speech is VIII ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.
Page 1
... living and buried speech is always vibrating here , what howls restrain'd by decorum . -WALT WHITMAN , " SONG OF MYSELF " Elegies are poems about being left behind . They are poems , too , that are themselves left behind , as literary ...
... living and buried speech is always vibrating here , what howls restrain'd by decorum . -WALT WHITMAN , " SONG OF MYSELF " Elegies are poems about being left behind . They are poems , too , that are themselves left behind , as literary ...
Page 5
... even austere . Until midcentury , graves were often left unmarked . The simple obsequies were much more about those who remained alive — about the opportunity to the living such occasions provided for repentance INTRODUCTION 5.
... even austere . Until midcentury , graves were often left unmarked . The simple obsequies were much more about those who remained alive — about the opportunity to the living such occasions provided for repentance INTRODUCTION 5.
Page 6
... living such occasions provided for repentance of one's own sins and for expressions of joy at the presumed " happy Change , " the departed's salvation.1o Immoderate grief suggested a lack of faith , and ministers such as Samuel Willard ...
... living such occasions provided for repentance of one's own sins and for expressions of joy at the presumed " happy Change , " the departed's salvation.1o Immoderate grief suggested a lack of faith , and ministers such as Samuel Willard ...
Page 10
... living in- doors , regular mealtimes , and most clothing . He spends much time alone in the parlor , admiring its cleanliness , perusing its library ( read- ing " considerable " in Pilgrim's Progress ) , and marveling at the gewgaws and ...
... living in- doors , regular mealtimes , and most clothing . He spends much time alone in the parlor , admiring its cleanliness , perusing its library ( read- ing " considerable " in Pilgrim's Progress ) , and marveling at the gewgaws 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 |