The American Puritan Elegy: A Literary and Cultural Study (review)

Jeffrey Hammond speaks for scholars in many areas as he lovingly defines one of the joys of critics' and teachers' lives: "to recuperate neglected or misunderstood texts" (xiii), to "translate their ideologically bound features into affective terms accessible to modern readers" (7). Hammond insists that early works be appreciated for their "alterity" (4), not be considered precursors of later works, and asks that they be read in a "dialectic of sameness and difference" (7), of otherness and continuities (9).

Hammond's focus is the Puritan elegy, the "most ubiquitous form of popular verbal art, apart from the sermon" in seventeenth- and early-eighteenth-century America (3). His introduction and first two chapters clearly (if sometimes a bit repetitiously) describe the difficulty modern readers of early literature often encounter as their contemporary expectations are frustrated. Hammond also persuasively demonstrates a reading process that Louis Montrose characterizes as "‘a mixture of estrangement and appropriation'" (6).

Although he does not mention critics like Paul Lauter, Jane Tompkins, or Wayne Booth, Hammond suggests that one difficulty in reading early elegies is the tendency of academics and critics today to emphasize the formal beauty of a text and its originality rather than its "utility" within a particular "cultural and historical moment" (1). He also reflects that critics have never quite known what to do with occasional literature, what to do with art that "does rather than . . . is" (8), "texts [that] do powerful cultural work in addition—and often in opposition—to encouraging their appreciation as ‘art'" (3).

In his discussion of a modern reader's estrangement from early American elegies, Hammond argues that "Puritan readers drew strength and consolation from the didacticism and conventionality of their elegies—the very qualities that distance the poems from us" (8–9). They experienced the elegies, with their central trope of resurrection, as optimistic, reflecting "intense longing for heaven" (6), as well as "idealization of the mourning reader, whose interiority was reshaped into an experiential parallel, though vastly inferior, to that of the glorified deceased in heaven" (39). Many modern American readers—for whom loss and grief are private and personal rather than communal—find only gloom in the "repetitive, predictable laments for the Puritan dead" (xiii), in the "heartlessly reductive" elegies that ignore the survivor's "agony" (2) and lack the comfort of "the enduring monument, the treasured urn, or nature weeping in sympathy with survivors" (xiv).

The opening of chapter 1 is brilliant: a description (drawing on David Stannard, Gordon Geddes, and Thomas Davis) of the 1712 funeral procession of David Dewey, with Edward Taylor officiating and reading his elegy for Dewey. A discussion of Benjamin Franklin's Silence Dogood parody of the formulaic nature of the Puritan elegy follows. I found myself mentally preparing a section of my next graduate seminar to include Taylor's (formulaic) poem, Franklin's parody, Thomas Morton's earlier (parodic) "Carmen Elegiacum" (65), Twain's Emmeline section from Huckleberry Finn (the latter two are mentioned briefly in Hammond), and "Lycidas," which Hammond uses to clarify the sharp contrast between the pastoral elegy in England, directed toward "university humanists" (33, 44), and the formulaic, fervent, sentimental, rote convention of the elegies in early America, sometimes mistakenly described as expressions of "cultural primitivism" (27).

Chapter 3 surveys biblical traditions, emphasizing "Hebraic resignation and Christian resurrection" (100), and discusses excessive grief (also a subject of chapter 4) as a rejection of God's judgment and wisdom, a denial of the "redemptive use" of grief in the sin-repentance sequence (90). Chapter 4 notes the popularity of the "self-elegy" (102), that is, the poem anticipating and welcoming death at different, even early, stages of a poet's life. These "homilies of salvific hope," like Puritan autobiographies and biographies, underscore the belief that "[t]he highest use to which a life could be put was an aid to others in...