Contemporary Male Elegy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8862612 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Iain Twiddy (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2011 |
| Volume | 92 |
| Issue | 6 |
| Pages | 662-678 |
| Publication date | 2011-09-30 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | English Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0013-838X • E-ISSN: 1744-4217 |
| Publisher | Routledge (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/0013838x.2011.604918 |
| OpenAlex | W2028327487 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 9 |
Recent elegiac criticism has commonly distinguished the ways in which male and female poets mourn their dead. In the work of Celeste M. Schenck and Melissa F. Zeiger, male elegy's purpose is to distance the dead in a determined Oedipal progression, and to assert the potency of the survivor, while female poets contest or reject such a pattern in favour of enduring contact. By examining elegies by Michael Longley, Paul Durcan and Paul Muldoon, amongst others, this essay tests whether this outline is representative of the experience of contemporary male elegists, examining how their work challenges such an emotionally and aesthetically limiting conception of their mourning experience. These elegies often centre on tropes of deference and guilt, inadequacy and continued attachment, where poets continue to mourn and draw comfort from their forebears. In this way the poems suggest a less restrictive taxonomy of male mourning in contemporary elegy than that offered by Schenck and Zeiger. Notes 1Barton, 55. 2Hallam Tennyson, 298. 3Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric, 34. 4Schenck, “Feminism and Deconstruction,” 13–15. 5Zeiger, 63. 6Kennedy, 86. 7Kennedy, 28. 8Kennedy, 26–7. 9Zeiger, 3, 11, 13. 10Ibid., 63. 11Plath, Journals, 473. 12Plath, Collected Poems, 224. 13Jenkins. 14Muldoon, Poems 1968–1998, 152–3. 15Ibid., 166. 16Sacks, 14. 17Schenck, “When the Moderns Write Elegy,” 97. 18Sacks, 8–17. 19Heaney, Opened Ground, 4–5, emphases added. 20The heritage goes beyond the family, to claim allegiance with ancestral Irish poets: Seamus Heaney's progression from farm work to poetry may owe something to a poem by Eoghan Ruadh O'Suilleabhain, where the poet announces his intention to write poetry after a day of “spade-work”; Daniel Corkery writes that O'Suilleabhain's phrase, “‘Labharfad féin go séimh’ (I myself will gently speak)” implies “I will put off the spailpìn, the earth-dweller, and assume my own self, the poet!” (108). Heaney translated part of O'Suilleabhain's poem as “Poet to Blacksmith” in District and Circle (25). 21Schenk, Mourning and Panegyric, 2. 22Virgil, 126: “nulla Venus, non ulli animum flexere hymenai” (4.516). 23Ramazani, 359. 24Heaney, Opened Ground, 184. 25Higgins, in Longley, ed., 20th-Century Irish Poems, 26. 26Heaney, Opened Ground, 304. 27Heaney and Hass. 28Heaney, Seeing Things, 3–4. 29Ibid., 50. 30Heaney, Opened Ground, 340. 31Ibid., 337–8. 32Durcan, 131. 33Ibid., 120. 34Schenck, Mourning and Panegyric, 18. 35Durcan, 157–8. 36Quoted in Adair, 17. 37Longley, Collected Poems, 30. 38Sacks, 7. 39Longley, Collected Poems, 31. 40Zeiger, 174. 41Owen, 76. 42Longley, Collected Poems, 236. 43Ibid., 258. 44Pigman, 2. Quoted in Zeiger, 13. 45Alfred Tennyson, 231. 46Donne, 59. 47Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 37–8. 48Alfred Tennyson, 89. 49Muldoon, Moy Sand and Gravel, 37–8. 50Jonson, in Norbrook, ed., 637–8. 51Plath, Collected Poems, 265. 52Heaney, District and Circle, 18. 53Ibid., 46
Art · Elegiac · Elegy · Literature · Panegyric · Poetry · Irish and British Studies · Samuel Beckett and Modernism · Theatre and Performance Studies
| Unique citing works | 1 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 0.09 |
| Citation span | 2015 - 2015 (1) |
| Citation velocity | historical |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 1 |