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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 , 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
through the relationship with the deceased, the second permits the speaker to r