Love and Death: Family Elegies by Wordsworth, Lowell, Riley and Carson

Close Readings

Seamus and Mark look at four elegies written for family members, ranging from the romantic period to the 2010s, each of which avoids, deliberately or not, what Freud described as the work of mourning. William Wordsworth’s ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’ (1807) is an oblique memorial to a brother that seems scarcely able to mention its subject. Like Wordsworth, Denise Riley’s elegy for her son, ‘A Part Song’ (2012), embraces the atemporal nature of poetry as a protest against the destructive power of time, but also uses dramatic shifts in register to openly question the use of ‘song’ as a method of mourning. Robert Lowell’s elegies for his parents, from Life Studies (1959), offer a startling resistance to the traditional elegiac mode by spurning the urge to grandiloquence with a series of prosaic vignettes. Anne Carson’s ‘Nox’ (2010) goes further by challenging the idea of a coherent account of someone’s life entirely, with a sequence of fragments contained within a single sheet of paper, ranging from poems and translations to telephone conversations, photographs and drawings, as a deliberately disordered memory of her relationship with her brother that nonetheless exposes the purest ingredients of elegy.

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Poems discussed in this episode:

William Wordsworth, ‘Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by a View of Peele Castle’

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/45516/elegiac-stanzas-suggested-by-a-picture-of-peele-castle-in-a-storm-painted-by-sir-george-beaumont

Robert Lowell, selections from ’Life Studies’

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/life-studies-robert-lowell

Denise Riley, ‘A Part Song’

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v34/n03/denise-riley/a-part-song

Anne Carson, Nox

https://www.londonreviewbookshop.co.uk/stock/nox-anne-carson

Next episode: ‘Poems of 1912-1913’ by Thomas Hardy.