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Notes Introduction The epigraph at the chapter opening is from Walt Whitman, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass: A Textual Variorum of the Printed Poems, ed. Sculley Bradley, Harold W. Blodgett, et al., vols. (New York: New York University Press, ), :. . This axiom is, in the broadest sense, my subject here. Among its crucial modern theorists, from Freud to Derrida, Zygmunt Bauman puts it this way: “Death is the ultimate condition of cultural creativity as such. It makes permanence into a task, into an urgent task, into a paramount task—a fount and measure of all tasks—and so it makes culture, that huge and never stopping factory of permanence” (Mortality, Immortality and Other Life Strategies [Stanford: Stanford University Press, ], ). Bauman’s industrial metaphor for culture (“huge and never stopping factory”) is not the mark of a materialist analysis. Indeed, Bauman has been accused, for example, by Jonathan Dollimore in Death, Desire and Loss in Western Culture (New York: Routledge , ), –, of failing to historicize social difference. But Bauman’s book makes no claims to be the sort of cultural history of death to which Dollimore himself aspires. Its pertinence to the cultural history of American elegy derives from its analysis of the ways in which institutionalized social arrangements tend, in all their historical variability, toward the obviation of difference, with enlivening as well as devitalizing results. . Philip Freneau, “On Funeral Elogiums” (), in Philip M. Marsh, ed., The Prose of Philip Freneau (New Brunswick, NJ: Scarecrow Press, ), . . Lydia Huntley Sigourney, Letters of Life (New York: D. Appleton, ), –. . My contention is that for many American poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, elegy was a crucial genre for developing specific cultural vernaculars to express new relations to old emplotments. From our contemporary retrospect, genres such as elegy have been, as Virginia Jackson argues, “collapsed into the expressive romantic lyric of the nineteenth century.” As this has occurred, Jackson continues , “the various modes of poetic circulation—scrolls, manuscript books, song cycles, miscellanies, broadsides, hornbooks, libretti, quartos, chapbooks, recitation manuals, annuals, gift books, newspapers, anthologies—[have] tended to disappear behind an idealized scene of reading progressively identified with an idealized moment of expression” (Dickinson’s Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading [Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, ], ). In other words, we have “lyricized” such genres and, in the process, discounted the miscellaneous forms of circulation that constitute them as historically contingent genres in any given moment. The extensibility of Jackson’s argument, which is grounded in a tour-de-force reading of what Emily Dickinson’s readers learned to call “lyric,” turns on how one defines the duration of the present. How far back does our “contemporary retrospect” begin? Jackson asserts that the lyricization of poetry begins in the eighteenth century, an assertion I would not dispute. But this does not mean that, even as late as Whitman’s day, it no longer matters what kind of poem elegies are. As Jackson herself observes, “the process of lyricization [has been] an uneven series of negotiations of many different forms of circulation and address ” (). . The important critical works on elegy include John Draper, The Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (New York: New York University Press, ); Ruth Wallerstein, “The Laureate Hearse,” in Studies in Seventeenth-Century Poetic (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, ), –; Ellen Zetzel Lambert, Placing Sorrow: A Study of the Pastoral Elegy Convention from Theocritus to Milton (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, ); Eric Smith, By Mourning Tongues: Studies in English Elegy (Ipswich, Eng.: Boydell Press, ); Lawrence I. Lipking, “Tombeau,” in The Life of the Poet: Beginning and Ending Poetic Careers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ), –; Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ); G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ); Morton W. Bloomfield, “The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation,” in Renaissance Genres: Essays on Theory, History, and Interpretation, ed. Barbara Kiefer Lewalski (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, ), –; Celeste M. Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction: Re-Constructing the Elegy,” Texas Studies in Women’s Literature (): –; Dennis Kay, Melodious Tears: The English Funeral Elegy from Spenser to Milton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, ); Louise O. Fradenburg, “‘Voice Memorial’: Loss and Reparation in Chaucer’s Poetry,” Exemplaria , no. (): –; Jahan Ramazani, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, ); W. David Shaw, Elegy and Paradox: Testing the Conventions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, ). Some related works of...
