Synopses & Reviews
Russian-American poet Joseph Brodsky is one of the most celebrated poets of our time, preoccupied with the the nature and destiny of poetry in our era. This volume analyzes Brodsky's career in terms of key elegies and investigates the critical role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics. In his elegies for poetic ancestors, family, friends, and the self, Brodsky demonstrates a concern for a paradox that is at the heart of modern elegiac poetry: attempting to find a basis for consolation in the face of death, but at length being compelled to discard traditional consolations, such as religion or art. The only source of relief is language itself, which Brodsky saw as both the origin and the final repository of values and truths.
Review
...ample hermeneutic, analytic, and comparative material presented by Rigsbee...World Literature Today
Synopsis
Analyzes Joseph Brodsky's key elegies and the role of elegiac thinking in postmodernist poetics.
About the Author
DAVID RIGSBEE is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Mount Olive College in North Carolina.
Table of Contents
Preface
Introduction: "Words to nonexistence..."
The Healing Needle: "The Great Elegy for John Donne"
The Disseminating Muse: "Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot"
Word within Word--and Minor Elegies
The 70s: "The Butterfly"
Fair Idol of the Lawn: Twenty Sonnets to Mary Queen of Scots
And Sailed into Muttony Clouds: "Lullaby of Cape Cod"
Destinations: "Nothing So Dear As the Sight of Ruins..."
Sister to Clio: "To Urania," "In Memoriam," and "Elegy"
So Forth: The Problematics of the End
Epilogue
Works Cited
Index