Poetics of Loss

Book excerpt: With the removal of death from the public sphere, mourning has become a private matter. At the same time, particularly in poetry, the trend is reversed. An intensely elegiac quality and a focus on absence, death, and loss can be observed in contemporary Anglophone poetry. This study examines the poetry of Andrew Motion in the context of the contemporary elegy, a genre which is at a crossroads between the anti-consolatory refusal to mourn, the inability to move past grief, and the strong wish for redemption from grief. Motion's poetry, which mainly deals with preemptive attempts to cope with loss, can be seen as a typical example for the contemporary melancholy mood in poetry. (Series: Erlanger Studies of English and American Studies / Erlanger Studien zur Anglistik und Amerikanistik - Vol. 15) [Subject: Poetry, Death Studies, Literary Criticism]