This chapter examines Propertius’ poetics of space, particularly as it relates to Roman imperialist rhetoric. Beyond the relatively obvious metapoetic images of height and lowliness, it suggests that Propertius employs a range of other spatial metaphors in his construction of a poetic self-image, drawing notably on the language of boundaries and boundlessness, centre and periphery; here, elegiac poetics capitalises on what the author terms the ‘centrifugal’ and ‘centripetal’ aspects of imperialist discourse, whereby Rome expands to fill the world, but also subsumes or draws in the products and characteristics of all other nations. In his more confident moments, the elegist represents himself not merely as echoing or collaborating with, but as surpassing the achievements of Augustus himself. A similar symbolic rivalry may be seen in Propertius’ self-representation as triumphator; the author links this in turn to the poet’s references to monumental architecture, particularly the ecphrasis of the Temple of Palatine Apollo in 2.31, which may be understood as a figurative monument to the power of poetry, dependent on but not identical with its counterpart in the physical landscape of Rome.

“Elizabeth Bishop” explores the close and lifelong personal and artistic relationship that sustained Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop from their first meeting in 1947 until Lowell’s death in 1977. Lowell dedicated his influential “Skunk Hour” to Bishop, and Bishop dedicated her own “The Armadillo” to Lowell. Bishop’s “North Haven” is widely considered the most eloquent of the many elegies addressed to Lowell. Over their thirty years of friendship, Lowell’s and Bishop’s lives became woven together in a vast and intricate web of words. This chapter explores their complex emotional bond, their influence on one another as poets, and the fluent exchange of correspondence, later published as Words in Air, that kept them going. The essay argues that in part through his friendship with Bishop, Lowell learned to master an art that, in the words of one of his poetic tributes to Bishop, could “make the casual perfect.”

If so much of American poetry from the early twentieth century onward looks to revitalize the genre’s forms and conventions by mining from the national vernacular, then jazz has been both a model for that process and a source of expressive inspiration. This essay looks at the range of American poetic responses to jazz, from the early modernist efforts of poets such as Langston Hughes, Sterling Brown, and Vachel Lindsay, to more contemporary figures like Nathaniel Mackey, Morgan Parker, and Kevin Young. In observing the long shadow that the music has cast on poetic experimentation, this survey also observes variations in identity and perspective and maps the reciprocal relationship between different jazz styles and modern poetics, including the tension between song lyrics and lyric poetry. Ultimately, this essay reveals through a wealth of examples the comprehensive heterogeneity of jazz poetry despite these writers’ shared starting points.

This chapter discusses an 1805 walk that Wordsworth did with Humphry Davy and Walter Scott,and the poetry that resulted from it. It investigates the interwoven and time-dependent relationships between place, people and poetry, and the post-1805 development of Romantic verse as a group discourse. It examines each of the walker’s responses in turn, and seeks, in particular, to evaluate the inflection of Wordsworth’s later poetry by the words that Scott and Davy brought to that 1805 fell-walk.

It is the argument of this chapter that in the 1830s and 1840s, the pressure of memorialising old friends who had suffered or died with madness caused Wordsworth to write a kind of poetry that responded to (what he saw as) deformity. In the process, fraught with difficulty, he modified his epitaphic poetics: a series of memorials mixed the traits of his elegiac verse with those of his epitaphs and inscriptions.

After 1805, Wordsworth’s ‘breach’ consisted of a turn from autobiographical poetry, and from nature as a recuperative power. Eschewing the personal confessions of grief typified by the Lucy poems, and the recuperations of private loss characteristic of The Prelude, he braced himself by writing poetry that bears with loss by embracing the permanence of art. In the ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle in a Storm’ (1807), the disruptive power of grief, arising from a disturbingly violent nature, is stilled only by contemplation of the unchanging formal perfection that painting and poetry are capable of realising. This poem was far from Wordsworth’s final word on the matter of loss; if it signalled a turn from autobiographical nature lyrics, that turn led to a further forty years of experimentation with various kinds of elegiac poetry in which the formal order achievable by the reformulation of tradition – epitomizing endurance beyond any single temporal loss – is preferred to exploration of subjectivity in the face of grief. Some of these kinds of elegy are explored in this chapter.

The epilogue draws out some broader conclusions from this study, encouraging us to rethink traditional narratives of ancient literary history. Archaic poets already participated in a sophisticated and well-developed allusive system, and Hellenistic/Roman poets’ ‘footnoting’ habits are not as novel, bookish or scholarly as we might think. The epilogue further asks why these indices have not been identified or studied at such length before; it explores variation in indexical practice across genres and time; and it highlights further avenues for further research.

This chapter examines the development of the āshob genre in the late 1870s and its contrasts with the post-1857 tradition. The context of the Russo-Turkish war prompted the circulation of shahr āshobs in the periodical press, which expanded to mourn worldwide ruin. Two distinct practices developed simultaneously: while the Awadh Punch built on the inherent plaintive dimension of grief to denounce oppression from the colonial state, Aligarh writers linked grief to regret to call their coreligionists to self-reformation. The emotional style of Altaf Husain Hali’s Musaddas (1879) and Shikwah-e Hind (1888), related to medieval Arabic elegies, became widely popular. The chapter shows how the Aligarh movement of Syed Ahmed Khan used it extensively to bolster elite community cohesion, especially during the anti-Congress campaign of 1888. Aligarh was then criticised for its manipulative recourse to emotion. The chapter highlights how Aligarhian discourses and practises were further criticised in light of the rise of early twentieth-century communal politics.

Ch 2: The second chapter looks at the complex confrontation of Christian lyric with death. Finality lends meaning to the life of the faithful, and lyric allows the poet and the reader to undo that death, to turn it into “love.” More concretely, Clément Marot’s word manipulations consistently use the praise of the deceased as a means of promoting the pursuit of peace, as if death on earth were unmade, at the same time, by the turning of “mort” into “amour.”

Premiered in Berlin, but composed in Paris, Arthur Honegger’s Mouvement symphonique n° 3 was a commission for the Berlin Philharmonic, and Chapter 5 deals with its reception, bringing the book back to its two major European centres. For reviewers, Swiss-German Honegger’s work, the third in a trio of symphonic movements that began with Pacific 231 and Rugby, was unambiguously neither French nor German, and it reveals mechanisms by which commentators sought either to assimilate the work with, or expel it from, Germanic idealist aesthetic traditions. Despite the work’s ‘sober and unprepossessing’ title, this chapter suggests that Mouvement symphonique n° 3 had a critical political programme – even if programmatic aspects were barely acknowledged in the critical reception. Manipulating the symphonic form, and referencing Beethovenian subjective narratives in particular, the work considers the changing relationship between the individual and the collective within a tumultuous era of political and industrial/technological upheaval, ultimately lamenting over the ruins of both the symphony and the utopian political project it represented.

While Canadian literary histories rarely talk about its WWI war poets (using instead the war years as a convenient chronological marker), Canadian poets of all kinds and talents – major, minor, professional, amateur, prolific, and occasional – were determined to hold forth, in verse form, about the war and its enthusiasms. This chapter examines Canadian war poetry (from the front lines and the home front) for its varied commitments to a shifting constellation of ideas about aesthetic power, gendered patriotism, and embodied pain – all of which are framed or refracted by abiding concerns with colonial nationalism. As it happened or as it was remembered, in Canada the First World War was framed as ‘the progenitor of good’, according to historian Jonathan F. Vance – and the poets contributed to that effort, even as they revealed the attendant anxiety and struggle of doing so.

This chapter describes the music performed by upper-class diners at archaic/classical symposia as documented by literary evidence and red-figure pottery. Following a discussion of the rise of the aristocratic symposion and shifts in musical entertainment from the picture given in Homer to the period when upper-class men began singing a repertoire of elite poetry at drinking parties, the following topics are taken up: the group libation paean, scolia, elegiac verse and its performance mode, other types of sung poetry, and dance. The aim is to identify the musical rituals as precisely as possible. This prepares for a discussion in Chapter 2 of the social function of aristocratic lyrody at symposia and its historical development.

By considering several of Johnson’s critical essays on poetry, this chapter compares his criticism of poetry with his own practice. In his lives of Milton and Gray, Johnson emphatically rejects poetics that employ language, images, and situations distinct from ordinary experience and normal speech. Milton and Gray are found wanting in this regard, with “Lycidas” ridiculed for its pastoral fiction and Gray indicted for thinking that poetry should be written in language remote from common speech. In treating London and The Vanity of Human Wishes, Johnson’s two imitations of Juvenal’s Roman satires, Richetti explores their differences from the Roman originals and shows how Johnson’s poems share many qualities with his occasional verse, written for friends to mark personal events, sometimes satirically, more often affectionately. The Vanity offers readers Johnson’s verse at its most powerful, unsparing in its renditions of the human condition, giving common language a vivid and almost terrifying concrete particularity.

Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

The chapter reflects on the impact of two waves of human colonization on North American biodiversity, focusing on three species’ literary archives. The first wave, the Bering land bridge migration during the late Pleistocene epoch, resulted in the extinction of megafauna such as mammoths. European settler-colonization beginning in 1492 resulted in the ongoing decimation of biodiversity, often termed the Sixth Extinction. Indigenous accounts of the mammoth, which may have persisted in oral tradition from the Pleistocene forward, came to the attention of Euro-American naturalists beginning in the eighteenth century. Exemplary authors include Thomas Jefferson and Joseph Nicolar. Ongoing interest in extinct megafauna has inspired proposals for “rewilding” ecosystems. The passenger pigeon was a wonder, a pest, and a source of food to early European colonists. After its extinction, it was mourned a symbol of settler-colonists’ decimation of the natural environment. Authors include John James Audubon, James Fenimore Cooper, and Simon Pokagon. The monarch butterfly, a candidate for Endangered Species designation, is threatened by local habitat destruction and global climate change but has inspired hopeful literary accounts. Authors include Barbara Kingsolver and Donna Haraway. A brief conclusion puts North American extinctions in global perspective.

How do you get to grips with an early American poem? A good toolbox of critical approaches and perspectives will include formal analysis, material texts, cultural work, race and gender, reception and reading practices, together with an inquisitiveness about the various ways in which a poem makes connections. It also helps to know some of the key uses to which poetry was put by English-speaking colonists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Worn pages show Puritan readers using devotional poems to support their daily piety in early New England. Manuscript elegies offered consolation to bereaved family members, and published broadsides shaped the values of the wider community. Commemorating a public figure could enable a socially marginalized writer, such as Phillis Wheatley, to find an authoritative poetic voice. Epistolary exchanges of poems among coteries allowed some educated eighteenth-century women to pursue their friendships and intellectual development despite being barred from public careers. Throughout the period, allusions ranging from homage to parody, illustrate the transatlantic adaptation of British genres and styles to American circumstances. In the revolutionary period, anonymous and ephemeral newsprint poetry whipped up patriotic feeling, while a handful of poets published their work in elegant volumes.

The book’s final chapter, on the work of Phyllis Wheatley, considers the aesthetics and politics of imitation. Wheatley’s poems both enact and challenge assimilation, by performing a form of Christian whiteness and decorum through acts of imitation for which she has been repeatedly criticised by contemporary readers. But notes of resistance can be heard in her images of chains, oceanic voyages and flight from earthly constraint. Wheatley’s poems transform constraint into ornament, but in a way that ironises her own experiences of capture and enslavement. This introduces a productive incompatibility between the prevailing aesthetic and the experience of bondage that must be overcome if the poem can be written. The chapter argues against contemporary readings of Wheatley as only a ‘sickly little black girl’, for whom whiteness itself was a constraint, and shows how she manages with limited means to particularise dominant poetic traditions to her own experience of enslavement and the Middle Passage.