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 Stevens's "The Owl in the Sarcophagus," Sylvia Plath's last poems, Elizabeth Bishop's Geography III, Sharon Olds's The Dead and the Living, Louise Gluck's 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.

About the Author

Toshiaki Komura is associate professor of English at Kobe College.

Reviews

In this remarkable book, Toshiaki Komura has discovered a poetic genre hiding, like Poe's 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.

-- Christopher Benfey, Mount Holyoke College



Book Information
ISBN 9781793612649
Author Toshiaki Komura
Format Paperback
Page Count 246
Imprint Lexington Books
Publisher Lexington Books
Weight(grams) 354g
Dimensions(mm) 219mm * 154mm * 17mm