The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

by Peter M. Sacks

Overview

Winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society

Peter Sacks explores the functions as well as the forms of convention in a book that is both an interpretive study of a genre and a series of close readings of individual poems. Moving from Spenser's "Astrophel" of 1595 to Yeats's "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory" of 1918, Sacks examines such elegiac motifs and conventions as the use of pastoral contexts, the employment of repetition and refrains, sudden outbursts of vengeful anger, and assertions of deflected sexual power. These and other elements of the elegy, he argues, are more than mere features of a conventionalized aesthetic design, they emerge as elements in the performance of the task of mourning.

Now available in paperback, The English Elegy is an ambitious and humane book, an eloquent work that counters the tendency of much recent criticism to lose the connection between literary language and the needs from which that language arises.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780801834714
Publisher:	Johns Hopkins University Press
Publication date:	02/01/1987
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	392
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.88(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Peter M. Sacks is an associate professor in the Writing Seminars and the Department of English at the Johns Hopkins University. He is also the author of In These Mountains, a book of poetry.

Table of Contents

Preface
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1. Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning
Chapter 2. Spenser: The Shepheardes Calender and "Astrophel"
Chapter 3. Where Words Prevail Not: Grief, Revenge, and Language in Kyd and Shakespeare
Chapter 4. Milton: "Lycidas"
Chapter 5. Jonson, Dryden, and Grey
Chapter 6. Shelley: "Adonais"
Chapter 7. Tennyson: In Memoriam
Chapter 8. Swinburne: "Ave Atque Vale"
Chapter 9. Hardy: "A Singer Asleep" and Poems of 1912-13
Chapter 10. Yeats: "In Memory of Major Robert Gregory"
Epilogue: The English Elegy after Years, a Note on the American Elegy
Notex
Index

What People are Saying About This

Harold Bloom

A grand achievement.

From the Publisher

A grand achievement.
—Harold Bloom.

Harold Bloom.

A grand achievement.

Editorial Reviews

Sacks's careful readings, full of suggestive and learned observations ranging from the lexical to the mythic, give this booka cumulative effect that is almost as moving as the elegies themselves.
—Journal of Modern Literature.

From the Publisher

Sacks's careful readings, full of suggestive and learned observations ranging from the lexical to the mythic, give this booka cumulative effect that is almost as moving as the elegies themselves.

Journal of Modern Literature.