The English elegy : studies in the genre from Spenser to Yeats

In an award winning book of literary scholarship, Sacks explores the functions as well as forms of convention and provides an interpretive study of the elegy as a genre. "The English Elegy" is an ambitious and humane book, an eloquent work on the poetry of mourning. (Poetry) 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. Interpreting The Genre: The Elegy And The Work Of Mourning -- Spenser: The Shepheardes Calendar And Astrophel -- Where Words Previal Not: Grief, Revenge, And Language In Kyd And Shakespeare -- Milton: Lycidas -- Jonson, Dryden, And Gray -- Shelley: Adonais -- Tennyson: In Memoriam -- Swinburne: Ave Atque Vale -- Hardy: A Singer Asleep And Poems Of 1912-13 -- Yeats: In Memory Of Major Robert Gregory -- Epilogue: The English Elegy After Yeats; A Note On The American Elegy. Peter M. Sacks. Includes Index. Bibliography: P. 329-365. Most studies of the elegy tend to describe rather than interpret the genre's conventions.