Useful Anthology of Elegies from Across Human History
Andrew Motion, and Stephen Regan, eds., The Penguin Book of Elegy: Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation (New York: Penguin Classics, April 1, 2025). Paperback: $22. 688pp, 5-1/6X7-3/4”. ISBN: 979-0-241-26962-6.
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“The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning, and consolation through poetry. Elegy is among the world’s oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practiced by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance, and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp.” Traces “the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil, and Ovid down to modern compositions exploring personal tragedy and collective grief by such celebrated voices of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, Terrance Hayes and Alice Oswald. The only comprehensive anthology of its kind in the English language,” it “is a… compendium of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honor the dead, and to give comfort to those who survive them.”
The organization of this book is alphabetic. I think a chronologic order would have been more useful for scholars. As is, excerpts from the King James Bible are between John Berryman’s 20th century and Laurence Binyon’s 19th century poems. But researchers who are more interested in the famous bylines covered than in the history of this genre would probably find this order more useful.
The elegy genre is problematic because it tends to be made up of paid-for pufferies that glorify wealthy patrons of the authors after their deaths. Many wealthy widows, siblings and the like can be convinced to sponsor the authorship of verse celebrating the deceased as they also spend money on a fancy funeral, or a tombstone. Poems about deceased also tend to illicit sympathy in readers, as is the case with the poem to “Milton’s… dead wife”, whom he sees in a vision as a “saint”: this allows equation between a deceased and sainthood that would have been sacrilegious in other contexts.
The “Introduction” explains that the Greek elegy initially referred to the “elegiac couplet—which consisted of alternating hexameter and pentameter lines” on any subject. Then, Romans turned to sorrowful reflections in elegies (xxvi). The early Christian “pastoral elegies” were highly formulaic: opening “with” a repeating “invocation to the Muses, calls on listeners to mourn the death of a young shepherd”, and other echoes. Then, during the Renaissance these became most capitalistically sponsored projects flattering the rich (xxvii). In this context, Wordsworth’s poem about an “unknown” woman called “Lucy” who “few” noticed died, but makes “The difference to me!” is thus a dark satire about such expressions of fake sorrow to elicit sympathy. Or ending with platitudes in a poem about William Wordsworth’s brother John at sea in 1805: “A power is gone, which nothing can restore; / A deep distress has humanized my Soul”.
There are some short summaries of the origin of the covered poems at the back of the book, in the “Notes” section. There are too few notes for a scholarly edition in the body of this book. Some of the older elegies are likely to need more explanation. For example, the “Introduction” mentions that Bion’s antique “Lament for Adonis” is “an important influence on Shelley’s Adonais”, but only that it’s about a shepherd, and a classical pastoral elegy is mentioned here, and then at the end there is a paragraph that explains Bion was “an Ancient Greek poet from Phlossa…” Then, there’s a note about when it was written, what it is like, and who translated it. There’s nothing about the historical context to explain what’s happening in this text (538). The poem includes references to characters such as Love (deity) and Nymphs, and Cypris, and places like Acheron’s shore populated with kings. Many things here can benefit from some annotation (38).
This is a pretty good collection in that it helps researchers in this field by collecting in one place a variety of elegies that are all translated into English. Researchers can then generate parallels and comparisons between these works for their unique research by searching for words, or themes across these, instead of having to search separately across these different writers’ texts, or various previous anthologies that included some elegies. The elegy genre is one that deserves closer study especially because of the problems with this genre I previously mentioned. The way humans mourn, or profit from expressing sadness over death needs to be studied as most canonical tragedies, and most pop modern movies rely on showcasing death, and convincing readers or viewers to feel sympathy over it. For these reasons this is a worthy endeavor. But I expect more of Penguin Classics: one of my favorite sources for classical literature.
Pennsylvania Literary Journal: Spring 2025 issue: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-spring-2025