Doctoral Dissertations

Date of Award

8-1998

Degree Type

Dissertation

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy

Major

English

Major Professor

Don R. Cox

Abstract

Recent studies of the elegy have focused on psychoanalytical approaches. Researchers have identified the movement from the traditional form of the genre to the "anti-elegiac" form of the twentieth century, and they have read the elegy in terms of Freudian psychology. Psychoanalytic theory provides a framework for understanding the work of mourning performed in the elegy, and researchers have concluded that the modem elegy is characterized by a "melancholic" mode of mourning that refuses to accept substitutions for loss through which the normal process of mourning restores psychic help.

What has not been previously identified, however, is the changing nature of the consolation provided by the elegy in a period of rapid, cultural change. The last two centuries have seen radical changes, both social and intellectual, in British culture, including the nineteenth-century "death of God,' and the repressed grief of the twentieth century. Yet, in this century of mass deaths, there is a peculiarly modem need for elegies, and the poetic form continues to provide consolation for the bereaved (along with other new cultural forms of mourning such as the Vietnam Veterans memorial, the Holocaust Museum, and the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt).

The connection between literature and society is analyzed through the exploration of the changing conventions of the traditional elegy as reflected by five different poets from 1800 to the present. The study analyzes the poems that these elegists wrote to commemorate the deaths of family members and also documents how the elegists coped with grief and in what circumstances they decided to write elegies.

The work of William Wordsworth, Emily Bronte, Thomas Hardy, Dylan Thomas, and Seamus Heaney is examined to establish how each one takes up the role of elegist and attempts consolation in the face of death. It becomes apparent that it is the very process of ordering sorrow into a work of art that becomes the consolation and that the finding of poetic form coincides with the victory over grief There has been a change, however, in the way that modern poets see the function of elegies. It becomes apparent, from Hardy onwards, that poets question their own motivations in writing elegies and see ethical dilemmas in writing elegies. Yet, their songs continue even while they debate their role in commemorating the dead. The elegy, a poetic genre since classical times, has evolved with the culture itself and now reflects the poet's preoccupation with unanswerable questions, rather than providing platitudinous consolation for the bereaved. Paradoxically, however, the elegy does provide consolation, by articulating the matters of life and death as well as by commemorating the dead.

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