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 41
Page 1
... seek to apprehend the ultimate , most unknowable condi- tion of privacy , while pointing , in their language of loss , toward the sheer commonality of human experience . Elegy is a genre that enables fantasies about worlds we cannot yet ...
... seek to apprehend the ultimate , most unknowable condi- tion of privacy , while pointing , in their language of loss , toward the sheer commonality of human experience . Elegy is a genre that enables fantasies about worlds we cannot yet ...
Page 18
... seeks to escape the dead weight of generations , African - American elegists must struggle to preserve traces of the sev- ered affiliations from which they suffer disproportionately . For many , and especially for slaves , to mourn ...
... seeks to escape the dead weight of generations , African - American elegists must struggle to preserve traces of the sev- ered affiliations from which they suffer disproportionately . For many , and especially for slaves , to mourn ...
Page 19
... seeks variously both to preserve and to can- cel through the unfolding of lyrical subjectivity . Less well remarked is Whitman's location of lyrical subjectivity in the figure of the elegist : the " lone singer , wonderful , causing ...
... seeks variously both to preserve and to can- cel through the unfolding of lyrical subjectivity . Less well remarked is Whitman's location of lyrical subjectivity in the figure of the elegist : the " lone singer , wonderful , causing ...
Page 21
... seeks to reveal , as Fredric Jameson puts it , “ the continuity between our psychic life and that of primitive peoples . ” 37 For Gates , studying the canon - defining work of African - American genres ( “ the repetition and revision of ...
... seeks to reveal , as Fredric Jameson puts it , “ the continuity between our psychic life and that of primitive peoples . ” 37 For Gates , studying the canon - defining work of African - American genres ( “ the repetition and revision of ...
Page 26
... seek and condemn , as if literature were merely a repository for evidence of the faults and crimes of earlier generations . This often has the unintended and unfortunate effect of hampering rather than enhancing possibilities for both ...
... seek and condemn , as if literature were merely a repository for evidence of the faults and crimes of earlier generations . This often has the unintended and unfortunate effect of hampering rather than enhancing possibilities for both ...
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 |