Styles of Ruin: Joseph Brodsky and the Postmodernist Elegy

(Hardback)

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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.

Reviews

.,."ample hermeneutic, analytic, and comparative material presented by Rigsbee..."-World Literature Today
.,."brilliantly written argument...A rich blend of poetics and theory, this sophisticated monograph assumes close familiarity with Brodsky's life and work and the English metaphysical poetry tradition."-Choice
...ample hermeneutic, analytic, and comparative material presented by Rigsbee...-World Literature Today
...brilliantly written argument...A rich blend of poetics and theory, this sophisticated monograph assumes close familiarity with Brodsky's life and work and the English metaphysical poetry tradition.-Choice
..."ample hermeneutic, analytic, and comparative material presented by Rigsbee..."-World Literature Today
..."brilliantly written argument...A rich blend of poetics and theory, this sophisticated monograph assumes close familiarity with Brodsky's life and work and the English metaphysical poetry tradition."-Choice

Author Bio

DAVID RIGSBEE is Professor of English and Chair of the Department of Language and Literature at Mount Olive College in North Carolina. He has written seven books, including four volumes of poetry and has translated poems from the Russian. His work has appeared in publications such as The American Poetry Review, The New Yorker, and The Georgia Review.