The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy (review)

Covering its subject from ancient Greek and Roman to modern times, The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy is a tour de force of erudite scholarship and learned commentary. A short review of a book is like trying to hold infinity in the palm of one’s hand or eternity in an hour. I have been forced to limit my comments to three topics: the handbook’s definition of elegy; its discussion of the elegist’s language and style; and its assessments of the aesthetic, psychological, or other criteria by which the success or failure of an elegy may be judged.

Some contributors stretch the term ‘elegy’ to include poetry of generalized mourning or loss. We may grieve, they maintain, for a lost age, a lost glory, or even like Wordsworth for a lost vision or dream. Erik Gray, by contrast, contracts the term almost to the vanishing point. In a learned and lively essay, Gray tells us that Browning, the author of such monologues on death as ‘The Bishop Order His Tomb,’ ‘The Grammarian’s Funeral,’ and La Saisiaz, wrote only one elegy, his fine but little-known poem ‘May and Death.’ Just as surprising is Gray’s judgment that Christina Rossetti, one of the great English elegists, wrote only one elegy, an obscure poem on the burial of her brother Dante Gabriel in Birchington churchyard. A definition of elegy that includes ‘May and Death’ but excludes La Saisiaz surely tells us more about the rigour of the critic’s categories or about his delight in paradox than about the elusive genius of the genre he is analyzing.

Arnold Krupat (at the other end of the spectrum) argues that Native American elegy is ‘apocalyptic,’ offering a ‘lament not just for a dead person, but for the passing of a world’ (347, 350). After identifying and briefly analyzing nine Old English poems that are elegiac in the restricted sense, Andy Orchard acknowledges that J.R.R. Tolkien ‘raised the stakes somewhat when he declared that if he had to pick a borrowed term to describe Beowulf, it would be “elegy”’ (108). Even Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings has been called an elegy. Preserving a judicious balance between narrowly restrictive definitions of elegy and definitions that are generously large and inclusive, Orchard reminds us that ‘much extant Old English verse is tinged with longing and regret, and the very acts of composition and transmission of vernacular verse in traditional metre seem to imply a connection to an unknowably ancient past, lost to memory, but enshrined in song’ (101).

A mourner overpowered by grief may be barely articulate. Though a poet who expresses grief may partially contain it, a merely eloquent mourner may make everything he touches seem unreal. In her excellent introduction, Karen Weisman, the volume’s editor, speaking tellingly of the way elegy, ‘more than other literary kinds, pushes against the limits of our expressive resources . . . it throws into relief the inefficacy of language precisely when we need it most’ (1). Nietzsche believes that ‘we have already grown beyond whatever we have words for. In all talking there lies a grain of contempt. Speech, it seems was devised only for the average, medium, communicable. The speaker has already vulgarized himself by speaking.’ When we talk too consolingly of the dead, we may no longer be speaking of a real loss but of a love like Goneril’s or Regan’s that has died in the heart.

Classical mourners such as Tennyson’s Ulysses, Tithonus, and the great earth-mother in ‘Demeter and Persephone’ are grandiloquent actors and skilled performers. The grieving father of the lines to Dufferin is the opposite of eloquent: he can barely stammer out what he feels. The difference between Demeter’s coda and the father’s halting words in the verse epistle to Dufferin is the difference between the impact that a rhetorician such as Mark Antony makes in his funeral oration and the shock wave or tremor induced by a private...