The most widely practiced and read form of verse in America,
"elegies are poems about being left behind," writes Max Cavitch.
American Elegy is the history of a diverse people's poetic
experience of mourning and of mortality's profound challenge to
creative living. By telling this history in political,
psychological, and aesthetic terms, American Elegy powerfully
reconnects the study of early American poetry to the broadest
currents of literary and cultural criticism. Cavitch begins by
considering eighteenth-century elegists such as Franklin,
Bradstreet, Mather, Wheatley, Freneau, and Annis Stockton,
highlighting their defiance of boundaries--between public and
private, male and female, rational and sentimental--and
demonstrating how closely intertwined the work of mourning and the
work of nationalism were in the revolutionary era. He then turns to
elegy's adaptations during the market-driven Jacksonian age,
including more obliquely elegiac poems like those of William Cullen
Bryant and the popular child elegies of Emerson, Lydia Sigourney,
and others. Devoting unprecedented attention to the early
African-American elegy, Cavitch discusses poems written by free
blacks and slaves, as well as white abolitionists, seeing in them
the development of an African-American genealogical imagination. In
addition to a major new reading of Whitman's great elegy for
Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," Cavitch takes
up less familiar passages from Whitman as well as Melville's and
Lazarus's poems following Lincoln's death. American Elegy offers
critical and often poignant insights into the place of mourning in
American culture. Cavitch examines literary responses to
historicalevents--such as the American Revolution, Native American
removal, African-American slavery, and the Civil War--and
illuminates the states of loss, hope, desire, and love in American
studies today. Max Cavitch is assistant professor of English at the
University of Pennsylvania.
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