“A Global Web of Elegies”

Abstract

Is the elegy global? To wrestle with this impossibly large question, can we approach it intrinsically by searching within elegy for traces of the genre’s worldwide reach? A contemporary elegy that can serve as a portal to the genre’s globality is Edward Hirsch’s book-length Gabriel (2014), a lament for the poet’s son that weaves a global web of elegies, citing more than a dozen mourning poets from classical and Edo Japan, medieval, Renaissance, and Romantic Britain, Renaissance Poland, nineteenth-century Germany and France, and twentieth-century Italy, Russia, and India. Though not comprehensive, Hirsch’s gathering makes visible the elegy’s global resonances, divergences, and scope.