The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by Judith Harris (review)

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• The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by Judith Harris
• Dawn Skorczewski (bio)

The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by Judith Harris

The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies by poet and critic Judith Harris contributes to studies of the elegy as a genre and to psychoanalytic interpretations of literature. Harris, a poet with a Ph.D. in literature who has published three impressive collections of poetry and a critical volume Signifying Pain (2012), is a rigorous and innovative reader. She addresses the usual suspects in her study: William Wordsworth, John Keats, and Sylvia Plath, as well as lesser-known voices such as Jane Kenyon, Edward Hirsch, and other contemporary poets. This volume is intelligent, probing, and elegant. Harris teaches us to appreciate the poems on the level of genre and line and highlights the theoretical contribution to literary and psychoanalytic studies.

Central to the book is the concept of interiority, particularly the question of the grieving speaker's inner life and its external representation in the container of the poem. She questions how the elegy as an externalized form can provide its own source of inner consolation and whether the poem can attest to the relationship between speaker and beloved. Harris also ponders the elegy's extension to the collective experience of loss. In each chapter, Harris explores a distinct psychoanalytic theory, discussing a new poet (or poets) and introducing a novel perspective each time. Her style of writing is clear and engaging, and the depth of her analysis and theoretical arguments is impressive. Throughout the volume, Harris manages a remarkable balance between explication and theory.

The introduction explores psychoanalytic theory from Freud to Lacan to Derrida and argues for understanding the elegy as a form that interrogates interiority and interconnection. She questions how the elegy can serve as a form of consolation for those who refuse it. For Harris, the elegy moves in three directions: the first allows the speaker to define themselves [End Page 297] through the relationship with the deceased, the second permits the speaker to remain with the deceased through the power of words, and the third serves as a vehicle for the speaker's separation from the beloved via mourning. This tripartite paradox of the elegy as coalescence, container, and conduit animates the volume.

In chapters on Wordsworth and Keats, Harris explores the tension between coexistence, container, and conduit and shows that it is inherently religious. These elegies vacillate between the potential of transcendence in the present moment of a poem and the belief that the departed transitions to life in Heaven, leaving the living to simultaneously celebrate and mourn this journey. Wordsworth's "We Are Seven" (1798), for example, presents the poem as a substitute for the deceased child. On the other hand, Keats's ongoing mourning of his deceased mother and brother functions differently, as the poem functions as a site for resurrection. In discussing these two elegies, Harris identifies a foreshadowing of Freud's model involving the internalization and introjection of a lost object in the ego.

Chapter 4 turns to the contemporary poet Jane Kenyon, a lover of Romantic poetry whose "Having it Out With Melancholy" (1993) enters into a dialogue with Keats's "Ode on Melancholy" (1819) and Freud's paper "Mourning and Melancholia" (1918). Kenyon's elegies lean more towards themes of depression and domestic life and question how one copes with the sense of emptiness that precedes their own death. Readers of Sylvia Plath will recognize this theme in Kenyon's poetry. However, Chapter 5 offers a fresh investigation of Plath's biography through a reading of her elegy "Edge" (1963), a self-directed elegy that attributes the speaker's grief to the desire to punish her mother for hindering her proper grieving of her father. Plath, whose father died when she was young, was told by her mother to move on and focus rather on her gratitude for her mother. In her poetry, this injunction against mourning ignites a drive to create. Harris draws upon Klein's theories to explore Plath's elegies as containers for exquisite rage.

In Chapters 6 and 7, Harris focuses her analysis largely on the...