Chapter Three explores the elegiac quality of three further collections, and Heaney’s shifting engagement with Catholicism as these develop. I explore how the tactile piety of relics lie behind the poems of North, even if drafts of these poems show how much Heaney redacted Catholic iconography in the published versions. I argue that in 1975, when North was published, the worsening sectarian climate may have encouraged Heaney to avoid language which might suggest a theology of intercession. Field Work contains a number of elegies for those killed in the Troubles and for several poets and friends of Heaney. However, I argue that the collection might also be read as an elegy for Heaney’s Catholic childhood. The note of elegy in these collections is most personal in The Haw Lantern, the first collection of poems published since the death of Heaney’s mother in 1984. ‘Clearances’, the sequence of sonnets written in memory of his mother, inform the whole collection, and in paying close attention to their drafts, I argue that Heaney’s complex engagement with Catholicism is somehow bound up with his relationship with his mother.

This chapter traces the development of Russian poetry from the earliest known texts to the late nineteenth century. The emphasis is on versification (syllabic, syllabo-tonic, and tonic [also called accentual] systems, all of which appear at times in Russia), genre, and style. Examples come primarily from the work of canonic poets. A distinction is drawn between folkloric and literary verse, which intersected only infrequently. Some attention is devoted to the ways that Russian poetry was indebted to Polish, German, and French models. The focus is on two periods: the eighteenth century, when secular Russian literature first began to flourish, and the ‘Golden Age’ of Aleksandr Pushkin.

The introductory chapter to this study of Propertius 4 as a collection composed in the wake of Virgil’s death begins by highlighting some of the more obvious ways in which the elegist advertises his allusive engagement with the Eclogues, Georgics and, in particular, the Aeneid, and how the troping of this engagement as hospitality suggests a relationship that might be cooperative or antagonistic. From there it looks back to the only two Propertian elegies in which the name Vergilius features – 1.8 (ostensibly referring to the Pleiades constellation but, it is argued, punningly invoking the poet) and 2.34 (in a review of Virgil’s career to date), each constructing a relationship between elegiac and epic poetics that, as later chapters show, will be revisited in Book 4. After these preliminary case-studies the Introduction presents a history of approaches to poetic memory by way of a survey of the scholarly responses mobilized by Propertius 4 as a Virgilianizing collection. These approaches are then tested in the laboratory of elegy 4.9, a Virgilio-Propertian diptych on Hercules which, it is argued, is programmatic for allusion and intertextuality as enacted in this collection.

The seventh chapter focuses on Latin love elegy, tracing its history from several Greek roots and in Roman comedy, and concentrating on the genre as a whole. It also looks at other poetic treatments of love, Catullan, Lucretian, and Horatian, in order to show what was so distinctive about elegy. At the end, it observes that the genre lasted only a short while, and explores some of the reasons why. Treatments of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, with brief exploration of Gallus

This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

“Elizabeth Bishop” explores the close and lifelong personal and artistic relationship that sustained Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from their first meeting in 1947 until Lowell’s death in 1977. Lowell dedicated his influential “Skunk Hour” to Bishop, and Bishop dedicated her own “The Armadillo” to Lowell. Bishop’s “North Haven” is widely considered the most eloquent of the many elegies addressed to Lowell. Over their thirty years of friendship, Lowell’s and Bishop’s lives became woven together in a vast and intricate web of words. This chapter explores their complex emotional bond, their influence on one another as poets, and the fluent exchange of correspondence, later published as Words in Air, that kept them going. The essay argues that in part through his friendship with Bishop, Lowell learned to master an art that, in the words of one of his poetic tributes to Bishop, could “make the casual perfect.”

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

This chapter discusses an 1805 walk that Wordsworth did with Humphry Davy and Walter Scott,and the poetry that resulted from it. It investigates the interwoven and time-dependent relationships between place, people and poetry, and the post-1805 development of Romantic verse as a group discourse. It examines each of the walker’s responses in turn, and seeks, in particular, to evaluate the inflection of Wordsworth’s later poetry by the words that Scott and Davy brought to that 1805 fell-walk.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.

This chapter examines the development of the āshob genre in the late 1870s and its contrasts with the post-1857 tradition. The context of the Russo-Turkish war prompted the circulation of shahr āshobs in the periodical press, which expanded to mourn worldwide ruin. Two distinct practices developed simultaneously: while the Awadh Punch built on the inherent plaintive dimension of grief to denounce oppression from the colonial state, Aligarh writers linked grief to regret to call their coreligionists to self-reformation. The emotional style of Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas (1879) and Shikwah-e Hind (1888), related to medieval Arabic elegies, became widely popular. The chapter shows how the Aligarh movement of Syed Ahmed Khan used it extensively to bolster elite community cohesion, especially during the anti-Congress campaign of 1888. Aligarh was then criticised for its manipulative recourse to emotion. The chapter highlights how Aligarhian discourses and practises were further criticised in light of the rise of early twentieth-century communal politics.

Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”

Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.