Throughout human history, grief utters a plaintive cry for the lost. As David Baker points out, in his foreword to In the Tempered Dark, grief would be inexpressible if not for the poet’s ultimate resolve to recover something from what has been lost, and that recovery takes the form of language, a language punctured by lack. Within this crucible of grief, the spirits of the dead appear paradoxically within the very words that claim they have vanished. Yet, as seen in In the Tempered Dark, contemporary constructs of grief and mourning have widened within literature and the current culture, shifting from pastoral paradigms of consolation to anti-consolatory melancholic elegies. In this scholarly review, I hope to give readers a historical and scholarly overview of the consolatory aims of early pastoral elegy, with the waning of religious narratives of salvation to the poets of the twentieth century who, consciously or unconsciously, departed from generic norms and ceded to the endlessness of grief. This overview will be aided by an examination of Freud’s “Mourning and Melancholia” and its important redactors, such as Derrida, when it comes to the ethics of grief and elegy. I then turn to specific examples in In the Tempered Dark, a seminal work that expands the definition of elegy and presents the very model of elegy that both critics and psychoanalytic theorists of the genre have presented, concerning the melancholic turn in which elements of the traditional elegy are largely eschewed. I conclude with some of my own personal reflections about my scholarship and my own elegiac writing.

The poetic practice of confronting grief through the writing of elegies has captivated scholars for decades as a subject of intense research, couched variously in terms of literary and cultural analyses, on the one hand, or through a psychoanalytic lens, on the other hand, that seeks to understand the dimensions of loss, trauma, and recovery—a life-long process of what Derrida calls “intermittent grief.” Consolatory elegies are associated with the classical tradition of the elegy beginning with Greek poets such as Theocritus, Bion, and Moschus, and endured into the seventeenth century, offering praise for the dead, lament, and solace. The elegist must rupture his attachment to the dead in order to affect a renewed attachment with the living, and we see this as poets making recourse to the substitutive powers of language and posit a compensatory figure—a star or a flower, for example—that marks the transformation of loss into gain. Anti-consolatory elegies, more often than not, break with the decorum of earlier modes of elegy and become more subjective, expressing the conflicted, sometimes enraged, emotions of the poet. The anti-consolatory practice of mourning has gained widespread currency among contemporary poets, including the poets featured in Tempered, and continues to seek commemorative forms intended to provoke, rather than console and superficially heal. 

Concerning personal mourning, Derrida (1996) prescribed the idea that we not only mourn a lost loved one who has died but something of ourselves, of our emotional world, too. Thus, as seen in Barthes’ Mourning Diary, mourning can be pathologized into an act of loyalty to the deceased—to give up suffering would in some way lessen the love, and therefore the quality or value of loss. This insight is fundamental to the inner turmoil of bereavement; and it runs counter to the linear accounts (including Freud’s) that, after a period of mourning, the mourner is able to reconcile the loss through a replacement. 

This linear perspective, pointing to a terminus where we just “get over it,” has been generally eschewed by most contemporary theorists and clinicians. The group of poets contributing to In the Tempered Dark have taken on the task of exploring the contemporary dimensions of the elegy through the production of poems that are coordinated with short ("micro") essays, also written by the poets. As Ruth Awad confirms in her moving elegy, “In the gloaming, in the roiling night”: “The hurt returns as it always intended – it is tender / as the inside of my thighs, it is as blue too.” Hurt is not repressed in elegy, it is to be interrogated, vented, mirroring the claims of Barthes and Derrida who reject the possibilities of displacement or diminishment of grief. In the micro-essay following her poems, Awad writes: 

It is interesting to me that popular models of grief—for example, the five stages of grief by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross—are orderly, tidy, mostly linear. I get it—it’s a very human desire to name and categorize, especially when a thing most eludes and resists arrangement. It is the same desire to control a forest fire. . . But my experience of grief demands that the fire must burn. It must raze down the pristine structures of your life, rush the mountainside of what you thought you knew and understood about the world. . .

Until a few decades ago, the most influential theory of bereavement remained Freud’s magisterial 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia,” in which he argued that the griever must withdraw a libidinal attachment from the lost love object lest mourning become pathological. For the mourner to survive, in other words, the dead must remain safely dead, until a new attachment can be made to a substitute object. A new paradigm of mourning appeared in 1996 with the publication of Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief by Klass, Silverman, and Nickman, according to whom survivors hold the deceased in loving memory for long periods, often forever, maintaining an inner representation of the deceased that is normal rather than abnormal. Nowhere is the theory of continuing bonds better seen than in elegiacal poetry, because the loss is not only revived but recounted through the compensatory language that fixes the deceased like a photographic image (or what I have termed an internalized double) in time. By bringing the lost object back to life, the elegy ironically shatters an illusion of loss in order to reclaim an object in who one’s grief can rest rather than remain in sorrow. What we have is an impossibility, an either/or, given that contemporary elegists cannot find solace through socially acceptable forms of mourning that rely on social or religious orthodoxies, or on transcendent imagery, and therefore reverse social trends to become anti-sentimental, anti-institutional, and anti-abstract, preferring to concentrate on the concrete. Plath, for example, de-idealized the dead and remained embittered. There is room to affirm mourning as reparative, transformative, and continuous, and I believe this is what In the Tempered Dark accomplishes, most remarkably, and why it is important not to turn away from the pain of loss but to embrace the losses as part of the intensity of love. 

I must count myself among critics who have aspired to walk the line between these two broad factions as I do in my recent book The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies. Over the past decades, academic discussion of the elegy owes much to Peter Sacks’ reading of traditional elegies in The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spencer to Yeats. As Sacks (1985) observes, a consolatory substitute for the deceased was often embodied in a metaphor drawn from eternal nature, while the poet employed several defensive strategies, such as infusing his own grief into nature’s sympathies. We can see this on display in Milton’s “Lycidas”: 

But O the heavy change, now thou art gone, 

Now thou art gone, and never must never return! 

The Shepherd, thee the Woods, and desert Caves, 

With wild Thyme and the gadding Vine overgrown, 

And all the echoes mourn. 

Sacks states that he derives his perspective from elucidating the connections between language and the pathos of human consciousness, beginning with the earliest pastoral elegies, positing the surviving powers of the elegist. Where Sacks and other critics may privilege mourning as a redemptive process, other critics, notably Jahan Ramazani in The Poetry of Mourning, privilege melancholia and emphasize the departure of contemporary elegies from earlier pastoral forms. We must remember that grief is paradoxical: it is a means of not grieving because as long as the inner representation of the dead is accessible, the dead go on living.

David Baker notes in his foreword to Tempered, that whereas the early Greek poets construed the elegy as a poem "for the dead," today's poets have carved out a space within the vast elegiac landscape for a "poem of the song of our grief," pointing to the collective spirit that editor Lisa Fay Coutley has embraced in her introduction to the volume, and indeed, to its genesis itself. Coutley’s project expands the boundaries of the conventional elegy to include what Darcy Harris has termed “non-death” losses, including the mourning/melancholy that results from the loss of trust and equilibrium, episodes in life that spur the mechanisms of survival, a mourning process that causes its own form of object loss. An important current that runs through Tempered involves the connection between grief and trauma, or “traumatic grief,” and how that condition finds some repose through writing. Psychological researchers, notably Cathy Carruth (1996), have shown that spatial and temporal gaps overdetermine memories of traumatic loss as people grieve. These memories are preserved in great detail, leaving a sensory signature that reactivates sensory experience and brings memory into symptoms originating in the body. In this way, Carruth shows that nonverbal images are stored and spoken through various containers, including recollections. Often, traumatic memories are dislocated from narrative and context and are encoded in somatic, sensory perceptions and images as well as aphasia. I think that this theoretical excavation of trauma is particularly relevant to many of the poems in this collection: we find the staggered lines, the synapses, the imagistic fragmentation and metonymical emanation of a language that embodies psychic pain. In Jessica Cuello’s devasting poem about her estranged father’s death, “Biocenosis,” trauma manifests in a series of violent images that her conscious mind screened—in deference to her mother and grandmother’s denials—and is brought back without punctuation or linear organization of time: 

and when he held the bloody head

of his own cub in his mouth

his shoulder blades poked forth

and he buried it with his hoard

only an hour away for years

a child he did not know

and could not love he

collected tubes of red

plastic bags batteries

a circular saw cords rags

cinderblock, plywood

Also, as Coutley suggests, in the context of domestic abuse, grief can manifest in a longing for the childhood one never had because, at the most basic level, the need for love and safety dominates our cultural narratives of family. In my personal view, grief is innate to our psyches: we are born into separation in infancy and tolerate separation from the mother through maintaining, what I call, a mental “double,” present within the psyche, that stands in for the absent object. Even before we have experienced the loss of an important other, the amorphous shape of loss pervades our very beings. Melancholia is a feeling of being lost in lostness, where the specific object is diffuse, but the feeling of yearning for something that doesn’t exist, or a nostalgia for something missing, is still palpable. The poet-mourner may move from chronic melancholy to making something of that abyss, whether in love, anger, or even disdain.

Poems and accompanying essays from nearly eighty poets constitute In the Tempered Dark through a variety of themes, techniques, and forms. From this paradox arises many vexing questions about writing, reading, and teaching the poetry of loss. Does an elegiacal poem provide both poet and reader with comfort and consolation following the death of a loved one—or only increased anguish? Does the poetry of loss facilitate “closure” or only endless mourning? It would be too formidable a task to detail how each contribution speaks to the collective ethos that has guided the volume's genesis, but I have chosen several of the poems that speak to the collection of "songs of grief" that readers will find within the pages of In the Tempered Dark. 

I begin my selected close readings with Susan Aizenberg’s poem, “Three Rispetti,” an elegy about the loss of her mother in the throes of her dying, alongside the paradoxical “skill” of the nurses who dehumanize the dying. The conventional structure of elegy is about personalizing the dead through praise, lament, and finally consolation. Aizenberg’s prosaic, beautifully crafted lines comport perfectly with the realism of the “unpoetic” specifics Aizenberg unflinchingly confronts: the disorienting nature of grief, chasms of emotional, psychological and spiritual wilderness: “the ticking row houses and alleys become / a place where we could rest awhile in the pulse / of electric blue light.” In the poet’s psyche, the deceased is still alive, the deceased can hear her, feel her, be with her. In By Force of Mourning, Derrida describes the unfathomable bind in which the mourner finds themselves. The only way to absorb death is to acknowledge that the deceased is “being in non-being,” a paradoxical presence in absence, given the fact that we can never experience such an absolute as non-being. The dead do not die easily in our imaginations. By selecting a “dignified form” for her elegy, Aizenberg unflinchingly records the horror of the dying process, but within the confines of her artfulness. 

A similar emotion is expressed by Chloe Honum in her poems about her own mother’s death, where it “doesn’t stop, like moonlight, / which has no pace to speak of / falling through the cedar limbs / falling through the rock.” Indeed, grief penetrates everything, even the obdurate stone, because the world is no longer the same and there is a human tendency to resist believing that something has happened that is so absolute, that love, particularly the love of a child, can’t undo it. Her end-stopped lines in “Spring” emphasize the cut-off of time and the curt numbness that one feels when shocked by an event, such as a mother’s death taxed by a history of trauma. By using a formal structure, particularly the villanelle, Honum displays grief’s “circling and insistence” so we may assume that a structure enables her to work within a frame that could contain the loss as well as re-experience it: 

Looking at my poems included here, written over a decade ago now, I see the influence of grief on my aesthetic. In the short, declarative sentences that open “Spring,” I see the urge to speak of a confusing time with clear, assertive syntax. . .in the villanelle form, the structure of which lends both steadiness and fuel: what could otherwise spin out is instead held firm and urged forward. I see also the repeated effort to understand what is being looked at and to orient oneself in a time of aftermath. 

In a conventional sense, mourning allows the lost other to be recovered in the symbolism of language so that the mourner can admit that something of the self has been lost with the other’s departure. Derrida (1996) shows how resisted mourning, an account of endless grief that forgoes recovery and consolation, represents a fundamental decentering of self that presumes the dead one’s being in us, a memory that speaks to its excess, a kind of exteriority belonging to neither inside nor outside of the psyche, as Didi Jackson so movingly expresses in “Nest” when writing about the “undoing” of her husband’s suicide, this final act, a decision that can’t be undone: 

This sheltering, this half-light

This corrosive wind, that blackness

That ignites this agony, all of the questions, 

This worry now, incessant, this piece of the nest 

Unraveled, then the next, this filament

Of thistle, this floss of milkweed, this bottom

Not holding. . .

What we feel and hear through the naked language of grief is the direct confrontation with the nothingness that refuses its own vacuum. The unrelenting torment is reflected in the lack of punctuation, the ongoingness of the trauma. Nothing holds sufficiently, to keep the memory intact: 

this knowledge of his empty, this knowing

of his ruin, this broken, that nothing holds

this nothing, this empty, that he could not be found, 

that I could not find him, that I did not find him,

that drive, that light, diminishing.  

Freud observed that an individual who represses trauma is obliged to repeat the ordeal as a contemporary event rather than remembering it as something belonging exclusively to the past. This enables us to partly explain why such agonizing experiences are dramatized in poetry over other literary genres, resulting in poetic tropes of consolation as an imagistic means of interweaving the dead with the living. For Jackson, the double bind in “Nest” is that she doesn’t want to remember, an anti-elegiac deflection of the loss—so in some manner, her husband dies twice: “that I could not find him, that I did find him,” and the memory fueled by sensation is diminished. There is a human need to symbolize emotions and images that are purely internal. Poetry is nonlinear and allows for condensation and displacement as the poet works through grief and simultaneously labors to relinquish their hold on the deceased.

Contrary to our conscious decisions, our attachments persist in terms of memory, desire, and emotions; they persist regardless of how futile, even irrational, they are to attain. Grief persists as long as a void remains to be filled, and increasingly in modern and contemporary times, grief takes on a political consciousness. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, there is an unprecedented rise in violent deaths due to war, violence, and disease, widening the personal experience of grief to encompass collective trauma and national mourning. 

In “Praise of Laughter,” Ilya Kaminsky extends mourning from the personal to the political in a moving elegy for his grandparents who were victims of oppression in the Soviet Union (as so many poets were—including Mandelstam and Akhmatova), and his elegy expresses not only the loss of family but a loss of a faith in humanity. As Marianne Hirsch (1997) has defined it, postmemory describes the relationship of the second generation to powerful, often traumatic, experiences that, despite preceding their births, were nevertheless transmitted to them so deeply as to seemingly constitute memories of their own. Consolation, reconciliation, restitution are out of the question; the torment of his ancestors must be retold, the wound must not be sutured, the burning is eternal. As Kaminsky writes of his Aunt Rose’s surreal eccentricities: 

…she spoke to poplar trees—

her ears trembling as she spoke, my Aunt Rose

composed odes to barbershops, drugstores.

Her soul walking on two feet, the soul or no soul, a child’s allowance

she loved street musicians and knew

that my grandfather composed lectures on the supply

and demand of clouds in our country:

the State declared him an enemy of the people.

Commemorating the dead is fertile ground for generative creativity and human understanding born out of the necessity of mourning, remembrance, and a refusal to accept consolatory platitudes that encourage forgetting at the risk of confrontation. However, there is also rage, as he writes: 

in the secret history of anger—one man’s silence

lives in the bodies of others—as we dance to keep from falling

. . . 

all our words, heaps of burning feathers

that rise and rise with each retelling.

In Wayne Miller’s, “Post-Elegy,” he seems to ask the same question as Derrida: can one ever go beyond mourning or envision the end of the end? Here, the poet is haunted by his father’s death, the ashes of his ashes: unshakable, ambivalent, and fixated on the memory, so much so that the speaker keeps his father’s ashes in the trunk of his car, figuratively and literally: “I never even / removed the box from its postal packaging.”  The “post” (a pun) suggests that this poem narrates the aftermath of remembering and trying to forget, as he acknowledges to his father: 

Finally, I took the box of ashes to the beach

where once I’d watched you swim, 

drunk, in the turbulent

aftermath of a hurricane. I dumped the dust

at the lip of the waves and they swallowed it up. 

It was easy as that. 

The metaphor of the “lip” of the wave and the ashes being “swallowed” suggests words being taken back into the oblivion of not knowing. Is it the voice of the poet who becomes the voice of the dead, who finishes the elegy for good? Derrida resists the “fictive” nature of binaries of consolatory and anti-consolatory, claiming the impossibility of ever moving beyond mourning. The last line in Miller’s poem is ironic—it is only as “easy” as it is difficult. Mourning only succeeds by failing: failing to accept, failing to forget.  

Finally, in Bob Hicok’s “Leave a Message” we see the resolution of binaries of consolation and its resistance. With each loss, there is an attempt at reparation, or a filling of the void: “When the maple tree died, there was always a place / to find winter in the branches. When the roses died, I respected the privacy / of the vase.” Death does not leave us without imagination, and Hicok’s good-natured speaker finds respite in every metaphorical evasion, avoiding grief by filling it with something else. But at the end of the poem, he reverses things that have died, with one thing that lived: “the fog,” an image of obscurity and restricted visibility, the way that we are left to imagine the dead. Instead, we mimic them by trying to know what they know—which is nothing: 

When the fog lived, I went into the valley to be held

by water. The dead have no ears, no answering machines

that we know of, still we call. 

An experience of emptiness not only informs painful memories of lost people but also paradoxically cultivates a subtle representational grid, where the fullness of being forms a dialectic with lack. There is an overall consensus among scholars that the contemporary elegy reflects the erosion of social and religious rituals that once contextualized loss. As I have discussed elsewhere (Harris 2023), this becomes a critical moment that has deprived mourners a consolatory context that had formerly been culturally accessible. As a poet, I have always been one who seeks to make the invisible visible, both in mind and on the page; we begin with lack, but end with the fullness that lack brings. There is nothing beyond language, even the language of non-being. When I see sunlight on the branches, what comes to mind is a question: how does wood burn without becoming fire? Put another way: how do we live through the unbearable and survive it? Psychoanalytic psychotherapy uses language through talking, but poetry uses language in a much more crafted way. At times, I wept while reading the poems in In the Tempered Dark. As more than one poet expressed it, there is a kind of sadness that is collective, benedictive, and transformative. As a psychoanalytic critic, I did a great deal of research on the therapeutic effects of writing in my first critical book, Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing—and it seems to me that all writing makes use of the unconscious. Understanding that liminal experiencing involves engaging a psychic space outside of the boundaries of ego opens up the possibilities of formulating a paradigm that deepens personal and collective experiences of grief. 

Dana Luciano (2007) writes that “grief recalled, through the pain of loss, the timeless truths that supported and stabilized the historical development of a humanity founded in fellow-feeling.” The poems in this collection confront the terrors of loss as well as celebrate the artfulness with which the language of grief transforms itself into the language of humanity. I believe that the open wound of grief can be sutured and healed, not only with time but with the understanding that the dead are always present in the imagination. Sometimes, the dead are so real to us that the division between death and life is dissolved, and the elegist attempts to speak for the absent other. The dead may be soundless, but in this collection they are singing.