Elegy & paradox

To what extent can the consolations of a poetry of loss be made to seem reasonable - even compelling - to readers living today? In the first book to ask whether a historical and critical knowledge of the genre elegy is still really possible, W. David Shaw shows how the elegist's testing of conventions poses new crises for understanding and new shocks to values and beliefs from one generation to the next. Shaw argues that the idea of an elusive truth, of an apparent contradiction that invites resolution, explains the power of many elegies we read. After exploring paradoxes of performative language and circular form in classical and confessional elegies, respectively, he examines the paradoxes of a silent-speaking word in Romantic elegy and paradoxes of breakdown and breakthrough in modern elegy. A contrast between strong and weak mourners in Ben Jonson's and Henry King's elegies, between impact and tremor in Tennyson's elegies, and between tough- and tender-minded mourners in Frost's "Home Burial," suggests that reading elegies, like writing them, is more than an academic exercise; it is also a life-and-death issue. Though a polemical book - written out of an urgent and timely sense of the importance of a humane, experience-based testing of elegy's rhetoric and conventions - Elegy & Paradox also retraces a path great elegists have always followed when modifying tradition and relating what is new in their poems to conventional elements.