Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11

(Paperback)

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Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 examines contemporary literary expressions of losses that are lost on us, inquiring what it means to lose loss and what happens when dispossessory experiences go unacknowledged or become inaccessible. Toshiaki Komura analyzes a range of elegiac poetry that does not neatly align with conventional assumptions about the genre, including Wallace Stevenss The Owl in the Sarcophagus, Sylvia Plaths last poems, Elizabeth Bishops Geography III, Sharon Oldss The Dead and the Living, Louise Glcks Averno, and poems written after 9/11. What these poems reveal at the intersection of personal and communal mourning are the mechanism of cognitive myth-making involved in denied grief and its social and ethical implications. Engaging with an assortment of philosophical, psychoanalytic, and psychological theories, Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry elucidates how poetry gives shape to the vague despondency of unrecognized loss and what kind of phantomic effects these equivocal grieving experiences may create.

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In this remarkable book, Toshiaki Komura has discovered a poetic genre hiding, like Poes purloined letter, in plain sight. Lost loss is a perfect way of naming that elusive sense of loss at the equivocal core of some of the most compelling American poems, from Wallace Stevens to the poetic first responders of 9/11. We may have thought we knew what poetic elegies were all about. Komura makes us think again.

Author Bio

Toshiaki Komura is associate professor of English at Kobe College.