Beyond Consolation: Death, Sexuality, and the Changing Shapes of Elegy (review)

Among all the major lyric genres, the elegy probably comes closest to approximating the ambition of supposedly grander forms like epic and tragedy in its concern with such “high” matters as the mysteries of fate, the pain of mortality, and the sometimes daunting, sometimes consolatory potential of literary tradition. But how has this time-honored (and, some would say, time-worn) form fared since that moment in the mid-nineteenth century when Arthur Clough’s troubled Dipsychus dreamt he heard the bells of Venice proclaim tauntingly, “Dong, there is no God; dong,/There is no God; dong, dong”? Mourned by Matthew Arnold as a shepherd whose “rustic flute” prematurely “learnt a stormy note,” Clough himself became the subject of one of the last, comparatively straightforward pastoral elegies produced in English. In fact, Melissa Zeiger argues, in “Thyrsis” (1867) Clough is represented as a lost “Orpheus figure” who reminds readers that “classical glory has departed,” along with, presumably, the stable theology whose disappearance this Orpheus so sardonically recorded.

The revisionary tradition—at times, indeed, a counter-tradition—into which that “classical glory” has evolved is the subject of Zeiger’s Beyond Consolation, an engaged and engaging study of the complex, late-nineteenth- and twentieth-century interactions between “death, sexuality, and the changing shapes of elegy.” To be sure, as this critic begins by noting, in the last several decades “elegies have been more prolifically written, intensively studied, and resourcefully theorized than poems in practically any other traditional genre” and this because the form’s “privileged poetic status” has made it “a primary site of critical renegotiation” (1) and, one might add, of creative reimagining. But while most scholars in the field have offered either political (and often specifically feminist) analyses of classical mourning genres (for instance, Juliana Schiesari’s The Gendering of Melancholia [1991] and Celeste Schenck’s “Feminism and Deconstruction: ReConstructing the Elegy” [Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 6, 1986]) or more general overviews of the form’s literary history (for example, Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy [1985] and Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning [1994]), Zeiger proposes an examination “of the literary and cultural politics” (2) that have reshaped this important lyric mode over the last century or so, with a particular emphasis on the (en)gendering of the genre. Thus, focusing on the Orpheus and Eurydice myth, which she sees as a crucial (if often subtextual) element of elegy from, say, Lycidas (1638) to “Thyrsis,” Zeiger traces the metamorphoses of that basically male-centered plot through the writings of nineteenth-and twentieth-century male poets—Algernon Charles Swinburne, Thomas Hardy, and John Berryman, along with such contemporary authors of “AIDS elegies” as Thom Gunn, James Merrill, Paul Monette, and Marc Doty—and compares these masculine variations on a theme with feminine (and often feminist) reworkings in texts by a group of twentieth-century women poets, including H. D., Edna St. Vincent Millay, Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, and Ruth Stone, along with such recent authors of “breast cancer poems” as Audre Lorde and Marilyn Hacker.

As background to a number of incisive readings (among which I would especially single out exegeses of works by Hardy, Berryman, Millay, Bishop, Merrill, and Hacker), Zeiger rather predictably traces the “modernist crisis in poetry [which is] particularly strongly marked in elegy through the failure of religious belief and consolation” back at least as far as Swinburne’s Ave Atque Vale (1868)and forward to the often misogynistic and bitterly disruptive writings produced in the calamitous shadow of the First World War, noting that neither “the gender-interactive scenarios nor the Orphean figurations of previous elegiac writing are much in evidence” (14–15) in the poetry produced by that conflict. Shrewdest and most original, in this connection, is her argument that the “drastic discontinuity in elegiac production” associated with “the catastrophe of World War I” has been...