Called the "mother of beauty" by Wallace Stevens,
death has been perhaps the favorite muse of modern
poets. From Langston Hughes's lynch poems to Sylvia
Plath's father elegies, modern poetry has tried to find
a language of mourning in an age of mass death,
religious doubt, and forgotten ritual. For this reason,
Jahan Ramazani argues, the elegy, one of the most
ancient of poetic genres, has remained one of the most
vital to modern poets. Through subtle readings of
elegies, self-elegies, war poems, and the blues,
Ramazani greatly enriches our critical understanding of
a wide range of poets, including Thomas Hardy, Wilfred
Owen, Wallace Stevens, Langston Hughes, W. H. Auden,
Sylvia Plath, and Seamus Heaney. He also interprets the
signal contributions to the American family elegy of
Robert Lowell, Allen Ginsberg, Anne Sexton, John
Berryman, Adrienne Rich, Michael Harper, and Amy
Clampitt. Finally, he suggests analogies between the
elegy and other kinds of contemporary mourning art-in
particular, the AIDS Memorial Quilt and the Vietnam
Veterans Memorial. Grounded in genre theory and in the
psychoanalysis of mourning, Ramazani's readings also
draw on various historical, formal, and feminist
critical approaches. This book will be of interest to
anyone concerned with the psychology of mourning or the
history of modern poetry". Consists of full, intelligent
and lucid exposition and close reading. . . . Poetry of
Mourning is itself a welcome contribution to modern
poetry's search for a 'resonant yet credible vocabulary
of grief in our time". -Times Literary Supplement
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