Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

At the turn of the millennium an elegiac view of English literature is especially apposite, and in critical elegies – poems written by one poet on the death of a contemporary or near contemporary – we find a distinctively concentrated and complex history of English writing, ‘the heart of literary history’ ( Lipking (1981) p. 138). Typically such poems characterize the main literary concerns specific to the times in which they were written. W. H. Auden's elegy for W. B. Yeats, for example, spoke of anxieties particular to the twentieth century – a century of wars and atrocities but also of remarkable emancipations – in worrying about the political responsibilities and efficacy of literature. By contrast, in the nineteenth century, poets as diverse as Shelley writing of Keats, Matthew Arnold elegizing his friend Arthur Hugh Clough, and Swinburne lamenting the loss of Baudelaire were all exercised by the possibility (or impossibility) of belief, and religious belief in particular. The concern which dominated the elegy of the Renaissance – coinciding with a culture increasingly aware of print as a means of preserving its poetry for posterity – was the English language itself: the question, repeatedly posed and diversely answered, was whether English might serve as the medium for an enduring and major literature. Critical elegies were particularly prevalent in the earlier half of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text