Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney by Jahan Ramazani (review)

96Rocky Mountain Review political transformation, social dispossession, cultural rupture, and linguistic alienation. His provocative project invigorates the Chicano agenda of recovering the American Hispanic literary and cultural heritage; it complements the works by scholars such as Erlinda Gonzáles-Berry, José David Saldívar, Héctor Calderón, Norma Alarcón, Rosaura Sánchez, Sonia Saldívar-Hull, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, Francisco Lomelí, María Herrera Sobek, Juan Bruce-Novoa, Nicholas Kanellos, Tey Diana Rebolledo, Luis Torres, Charles Tatum, Clara Lomas, Raymund Paredes, Gabriel Meléndez, and Enrique Lamadrid. In his serious effort to examine the origins of the Mexican American literary and cultural autobiographical production, Genaro Padilla searches for the cultural genre and critical autobiographical practice under multilayered documents unpublished or unread, untranslated or mistranslated. His critical interpretation of Mexican American autobiography not only charts a new theoretical model for autobiography scholars, but it proposes an invaluable cultural model to approach the concept of "new subjectivity" at the core of defeat and rupture. Genaro Padilla skillfully articulates Mexican American autobiographical writing as a cultural discourse, not of assimilation , but of resistance. This body of cultural autobiography, he suggests, registers the "cultural schizophrenia" during a crucial socio-cultural, political , and historical moment as Mexican Americans struggled to reposition themselves in a world of loss. My History, Not Yours: The Formation of Mexican American Autobiography is an indispensable reading in the fields of cultural analysis, ethnic studies, autobiography, and Chicano studies. MAGDALENA MAÍZ-PEÑA Davidson College JAHAN RAMAZANI. Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy toHeaney. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994. 419 p. Jahan Ramazani, like Peter Sacks in The English Elegy (1985), uses Freud's definitions of mourning and melancholia to discuss elegiac poetry. Sacks' thesis is both model and target for Ramazani's very contemporary— ethnically diverse, politically concerned—approach to the twentieth-century elegy. Ramazani asserts that the psychic basis for the modern elegiac poem is melancholia rather than, as Sacks argued, traditional compensatory mourning. In a Freudian view, then, the modern elegy indulges in an unhealthy refusal to be comforted, tends "not to override but to sustain anger, not to heal but to reopen the wounds of loss" (xi). Poets of this age, Ramazani argues, find the losses to be too vast, the existential questions too deep, the possibility of supernatural compensation too remote for traditional elegy. Modern poets insist, raging, that word replaces no thing and text substitutes for no loved body. Thus traditional elegies express socially acceptable "healthy" mourning; modern elegies reverse social trends, becoming anti-sentimental, anti-institutional, and anti-abstract (16). Book Reviews97 Ramazani employs both genre and psychoanalytic theories to demonstrate that "the elegy flourishes in the modern period by becoming antielegiac (in generic terms) and melancholic (in psychological terms)" (xi). He defines Thomas Hardy, in chapter 1, as a transitional figure between elegiac and anti-elegiac eras. Wilfred Owen's poetry, in chapter 2, proves the impotence of traditional elegy to deal with destruction on a scale of world war. Chapter 3 reveals Wallace Stevens' modern anti-elegy to be a powerful vehicle for social critique. In chapter 4, Ramazani subdivides Langston Hughes' elegiac poetry into blues, monologues on mortality, and lynch poems. In chapter 5, he attributes W.H. Auden's building of linguistic sympathy between subject and mourned object to his homosexuality, an idea likely to provoke debate. In chapters 6 and 8—"American Family Elegy I" and "II"—Ramazani introduces a major revision wrought by moderns whose transformation of elegies "allow for ambivalence" toward the dead, especially dead parents: in one chapter, the spectacle of poet-sons (Robert Lowell, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Harper) wrestling with dead fathers; in the other, three poets (Anne Sexton, Adrienne Rich, and Amy Clampitt) "rethinkfing] the daughter's position within the family romance" (294). Chapter Seven on Sylvia Plath manages both to explain and to exploit critical exploitation of her suicide, but it also credits Plath with "flouting the modern social taboo on death" (292). The last chapter deals with Seamus Heaney and his poetry 's relationship to the inherited burdens of political violence. The book ends with a "Coda" that "reads" the Vietnam War Memorial and...