Poetry of Lost Loss: a Study of the Modern Anti-Consolatory Elegy.

Abstract

Bypassing the current theory that attributes the absence of consolation in modern elegies to melancholic mourning and skepticism about elegiac conventions, this dissertation interprets such disconsolation through the phenomenon of “lost loss”: a feeling that a specific loss is either absent, ineffectual, or itself lost, or has become a stand-in or screen for something else. Poetry of lost loss simulates a mood more aptly described as one of a subdued, causeless, chronic “dysthymia”: when the loss is itself lost and is felt only as a dysthymic trace, the notion of mourning becomes obsolete, since there is nothing left to be mourned for except a faint echo of undefined dispossession.

To investigate the origin of this obsolescence, Chapter 1 studies how William Wordsworth’s later poems and Essays upon Epitaphs regard elegies as necessary fictions. Chapter 2 hypothesizes that Wallace Stevens’s creation of the fictive “mythology” in his allegorical elegies unveils the loss of loss, and suggests that the function of elegy is less to mourn and console than to attempt to locate an unplaced feeling of equivocal loss through its exploratory utterances. Using these core concepts—how the loss of loss leads to a creation of a fictive, makeshift expressive medium similar to what Nicholas Abraham and Maria Torok call a “phantom” in The Shell and the Kernel—Chapter 3 surveys various forms of lost loss in Theodore Roethke’s generic elegies, John Berryman’s Dream Songs, and Sylvia Plath’s poems of 1963. Chapter 4 reads Elizabeth Bishop’s Geography III as a case of an anxiety over the prospect of lost loss.

In conclusion, the dissertation observes that, in the dysthymia of lost loss, a loss would be left unrecognized until the elegy constructs the fact of the loss and adds a linguistic shape to it. To capture such elusive traces of privation, elegists create phantoms—like Stevens’s sarcophagus allegory or Roethke’s imaginary Aunt Tilly—to forge figurations for vague dejections. In the dismal catastrophe of reality, one finds a way to live in the world of imagination: the poetic forgery of loss is a product of this dysthymic lost loss.