The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

by Peter M. Sacks

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.

Genres: Literary Criticism, Academic, Nonfiction

392 pages, Paperback

First published May 1, 1985

About the author

Peter M. Sacks (born in 1950) is an expatriate South African painter/poet living in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Normandy, France.

Reviews

[Kevin Fitzpatrick · Rating 4 out of 5]

Initially introducing the reader to the general background of the subject (the work of mourning and its relation to vegetation myths associated with castration and subsequent rebirth) through a chapter entitled "Interpreting the Genre: The Elegy and the Work of Mourning," Peter Sacks's "The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats" is a comprehensive, deeply analytical and profound exploration of the genre of the the elegy in the English tradition. Starting as it does with works by Spenser, Kyd, and Shakespeare, this study then transitions to a survey of all the major elegies present in the British tradition, including Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," Tennyson's "In Memorium," Hardy's poems of 1912-1913, and Yeats's "In Memory of Robert Gregory." The author does a superb job of laying out the strictures of the genre, and then showing how the successive poets revised and, sometimes, subverted these limits in their own versions of the elegy. Finally, the book ends with post-Yeatsian efforts in the British tradition, and the American efforts at the same genre.
What is essential to the author's successful mating of specific readings and knowledge of each poem to the analytical traditions involved is the opening chapter that elucidates the mythological and psychological features of the elegy. For Mr. Sacks links the genre to both the traditional modes of successful mourning established by Freudian psychology as well as the vegetation myths associated with archaic religious figures such as Adonis and Tammuz. It is this linking of literary criticism to both the worlds of psychology and mythology that, in the mind of this reader at least, made the commentary found in each individual chapter so insightful and revealing. And all along the way this theoretical apparatus is married to a critical analysis that proves clearly the veracity of the ideas at the center of the book.
Recommended for all of those readers who are interested in English poetry as well as those whose interest veer towards the theoretical, "The English Elegy" is a grand read whose perspicacity and wisdom will change how you view the poems treated as well as poetry in the more broad sense.

[maría de las nieves · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funnily enough his reading of American elegy is actually the best part of the book

[Nancy · Rating 3 out of 5]

The intro is pretty good. Sacks asserts that a good elegy is one written with self-distance. He also focuses on the ritualistic aspect of elegy, repeating name of dead, ceremony, etc. His take on Lycidas is interesting. He thinks of elegy in a very traditional sense. And I know more info on the elegy than I ever wanted.