Peter Sacks, The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats

Abstract

“Studies” might give a misleading idea of Peter Sacks’s impressive book, which is really a unified study of the genre, consistent in its approach to the poems considered. It is not a survey of “elegy”, but an attempt to interpret the conventions of the genre, to approach the “core of loss”. The elegies selected are subjected to an investigation that is psychologically based; intended to reveal patterns, instinctual rather than formal, of resumed song, anger in bereavement, assimilated grief and consolation. Sacks’s book is made interesting by his willingness to try his approach on less obvious poems — elegy in the form of epigram (Jonson), or lyric (Hardy), alongside the full scale monodies.