American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman (review)

In his skillfully written and subtly argued American Elegy, Max Cavitch performs an important service to readers of American literature by tracing the neglected history of the elegy from the end of the Puritan period to Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d.” After a provocative theoretical introduction, Cavitch devotes six chapters to the following subjects: the political work of the elegy in the eighteenth century, the national mourning for George Washington, elegiac appropriations of nature and the Indians in William Cullen Bryant, Emerson’s radical revision of nineteenth-century elegies for children, the conjunction of mourning and slavery in African American elegies, and Whitman’s homoerotic mourning for Lincoln in “Lilacs.” Taking advantage of the large number of elegies produced during this time period, Cavitch employs the genre as a focal point for a set of profound meditations upon the cultural work that poetry can perform: “The extravagant idea of this book is that the telos of American elegy is not consolation for the deaths of others, but fulfillment, rather, of a specifically political, shared happiness that ‘loss’ misnames” (24). Shared mourning, he contends, creates the shared obligations of the republic.

At the core of Cavitch’s brief for the social impact of elegy is an exhortation: “Americanists need to read more poetry” (84). This book joins a growing number of studies of pre-twentieth-century poetry that argue for its importance to the lived reality of American culture during this time. Elegies, in particular, were not only read and recited but also composed with a remarkable ubiquity. Taking poetry seriously as an integral part of the construction of citizenship, Cavitch performs two kinds of analysis. He draws together large numbers of elegies into important social patterns, as in his delineations of eighteenth-century patriotic elegies, nationalist elegies mourning the death of Washington, elegiac treatments of the removal and genocide of Native Americans, elegies for children, elegies for slaves, and elegies for Lincoln. Secondly, he embeds within his presentation of elegiac patterns fully sustained and brilliantly new analyses of major poems by Wheatley, Bryant, Emerson, and Whitman. As a reader of twentieth-century poetry, I was gratified not only to learn of the long elegiac foreground preceding “Lilacs” but also to receive Cavitch’s hints about the future life of Whitman’s vision of mourning, specifically in a brief treatment of Allen Ginsberg’s “Kaddish.” The lineage of descent from Whitman could be expanded by looking at the elegiac poetry of two other “sons of Walt,” Federico García Lorca and Robert Duncan, whose elegies about the First World War and the Vietnam War, respectively, are filled with the same homoerotic grief—a grief felt by these childless poets for what Lorca called “the unengendered child”—that informs Whitman’s elegies of the Civil War. Cavitch’s mediations on the generative quality of mourning have value for anyone who wants to understand how poetry can combine the most private and the most public sentiments into a politically efficacious work.