Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry
Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11
Abstract
Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 examines contemporary literary expressions of losses that are “lost” on us, inquiring what it means to “lose” loss and what happens when dispossessory experiences go unacknowledged or become inaccessible. Toshiaki Komura analyzes a range of elegiac poetry that does not neatly align with conventional assumptions about the genre, including Wallace Stevens’s “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” Sylvia Plath’s last poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III, Sharon Olds’s The Dead and the Living, Louise Glück’s Averno, and poems written after 9/11. What these poems reveal at the intersection of personal and communal mourning are the mechanism of cognitive myth-making involved in denied grief and its social and ethical implications. Engaging with an assortment of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and psychological theories, Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry elucidates how poetry gives shape to the vague despondency of unrecognized loss and what kind of phantomic effects these equivocal grieving experiences may create.
Schlagworte
Poetry American poetry Elizabeth Bishop psychoanalysis in literature reading trauma Sylvia Plath Trauma Studies loss in literature grief Post-9/11 Wallace Stevens modern poetry contemporary poetry- 1–34 Introduction 1–34
- 175–188 Conclusion & Afterword 175–188
- 189–210 Bibliography 189–210
- 211–214 Acknowledgments 211–214
- 215–226 Index 215–226
- 227–228 About the Author 227–228