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Propomos uma análise dos poemas que, na obra de Alberto de Lacerda (1928- 2007), elegem como pretexto a personalidade artística ou a criação plástica de Maria Helena Vieira da Silva. Combinando reminiscência afetiva, tributo elegíaco e pulsão ecfrástica, os textos que o poeta de Oferenda dedica à pintora não são imunes ao discurso crítico que em torno da sua singularíssima obra foi sendo produzido, em âmbito artístico, e que, desde sempre, acentuou a sua consubstancial portugalidade.

The critics and literary historians that deal with the Spanish secular theater of the late Middle Ages have not come up yet with a satisfactory account of that theater's distinctive developments. Still unexplained remain the specific traits of the autochthonous literary tradition that came to a head in Femando de Rojas's acclaimed masterpiece, commonly known as Celestina. A case in point is the monumental La originalidad artistica de 'La Celestina',' in which Maria Rosa Lida de Malkiel leaves no stone untumed in a painstaking reconstruction of Rojas's artistic background. It is fair to point out that, in privileging foreign influences, Lida de Malkiel does not resolve the ultimate question as to how Rojas's authentic Hispanic sources came to be integrated into his own ingenious transformation of the comedia's Terentian, "elegiac," and humanistic phases.

In questo contributo propongo alcune riflessioni su una similitudine nell’Achilleide di Stazio (1.178–181), contenuta nella prima apparizione di Achille sulla scena. In pochi versi Stazio condensa un’immagine atletico–eroica, prefigurazione del futuro eroe epico della guerra troiana, ma paradossalmente espressa con un linguaggio formulare allusivamente erotico– elegiaco, di stampo callimacheo, teocriteo ed anche elegiaco. In particolare, il modello properziano, richiamato qui e in altri luoghi dell’Achilleide con sicuri riferimenti all’elegia 3.14, si rivela non solamente un mero repertorio lessicale al quale attingere, ma anche un sapiente exemplum per la riflessione metapoetica, particolarmente sostenuta all’interno del primo libro dell’Achilleide, ed incentrata sulla ‘curvatura’ del genere letterario coltivato. In this paper, I propose a reading of a simile in Statius’ Achilleid (1.178–181), inside the Achilles’ first appearance on the scene. In a few lines, Statius condenses an athletic–heroic image, prefiguring the future epic hero of the Trojan war, but paradoxically expressed with an allusive erotic–elegiac language, inspired on the Challimacus’, Theocritus’ and elegiac also style. In particular, the Propertian model, recalled here and in other places of the Achilleid with certain references to elegy 3.14, reveals itself not only as a simple lexical repertoire to draw from, but also a wise exemplum for the metapoetic reflection, particularly supported within the first book of Achilleid, and focused on the ‘curve’ of the cultivated literary genre.

The article deals with the comparison of the motive of remembering typical for the genre of elegy on the whole and those works of A.P. Chekhov which have elegiac motives. The analysis of the topic shows that the motive of remembering in Checkov’s works has been essentially transformed. If we take the romantic elegy (very typical for the works of B. Zhukovsky) the Past plays the greatest role. For Chekhov at the end of 1880s axiological status of the Past is less worthy (“Verochka”, “Mrs. NN’s Narration”, “The Steppe”). According to Chekhov focusing on the Past ignoring the Present can cause the spiritual crisis. We can observe it in the Story “Verochka”. Another difference: Chekhov himself and some of his literary characters realize that human conscience can idealize the Past thus distorting the reality. At last in V. Zhukovsky’s Elegies memory of the Past is the determining motive in life. It smoothes the contrast between the Present and the Past. For Chekhov’s personages warm memory of the Past is just a moment. It does not help to improve the present situation.

Intersectionality is a sociological concept that makes possible to deal with gender issues in a more comprehensive way by taking into consideration the social status and ethnicity in the constructing process of the female image. Therefore, it is an important concept both in the approaches related to gender studies in general and in this study in particular. This article aims to address the education of Roman women in their social context, taking into account the literary production of the moment, as well as the intertwining of discrimination factors. Here, the influence of literary circles on the publication of the elegiac works of a woman in particular will be analyzed: Sulpicia, “the Elegiac”.

In Peristephanon 14, Prudentius creates an inventive verse rendering of the martyrdom of Agnes. Interestingly, in this poem, the portrayal of Agnes shares many features with the elegiac puellae of Roman love elegy. Prudentius’ classicising poetry is characterised by the mixture of genres and literary traditions, one of them being Roman love elegy. The affinities, however, between Prudentius and the latter tradition deserve closer attention. In this paper, by identifying vocabulary, themes and motifs of Roman elegy in Peristephanon 14, I will illustrate ways in which Prudentius’ Agnes can be read as a Christianised elegiac puella.

Arma uirumque cano… ‘Je chante les armes et l'homme …’ ainsi commence l’Énéide, ainsi devrait commencer toute poésie.It is far from an overstatement to make the claim that in the surviving corpus of Latin poetry no phrase is more immediately identifiable than the pronouncement of the Virgilian narrator on the ‘arms and the man’ of his subject matter. The presence ofarma uirumquein a particular formation cannot fail to put us in mind of theAeneidand its concomitant ideological associations. A consequence of the epic's centrality as a canonical text was the emergence in antiquity ofarma uirumqueas a synecdochic quotation for the work as a whole and, as such, for the figure of the poet himself. This transformation was further actuated by the ancient practice of ascribing titular authority to a poem's incipit, ensuring that arms and the man took on especial resonance. Even within theAeneid, self-referential intratextual play with the Virgilian utterance can be detected. Furthermore, in post-Augustan verse, Fowler argues thatarmaalone is always loaded in a metaliterary fashion, serving as an identifying marker for Virgil's epic or, more broadly, for epic in general. This was so marked a phenomenon that the opening word of the poem was recycled and reworked by Ovid around a decade after the compositional beginnings of theAeneid, in the first book of theAmores, in what formed an announcement of the redeployment of epicarmainto the elegiac world ofmilitia amoris(Am. 1.1–2).

Summary In the Aeneid, the recurrent themes of ‘construction’ and ‘destruction’ (the topic of the Latin final exam of 2020) can be connected to generic roles. Dido, founder of Carthage, is presented progressively in elegiac terms, as is suggested by a number of echoes of Sapphic love poetry; as a character, she is guided primarily by personal motives. Dido’s ‘elegiac role’ forebodes her own destruction and that of her city. Aeneas, on the other hand, needs to adhere to his epic role as founder of the new Trojan/Roman nation, in order to avert destruction and the repetition of Troy’s fate. When during his stay in Carthage he starts to show signs of transforming into an elegiac lover, the gods intervene and put him back onto the epic track: the public interest should take precedence over personal feelings. This opposition between elegiac Dido and epic Aeneas may grant insight into Vergil’s message for his contemporaries.

Resumo Para verter o dístico elegíaco latino, algumas traduções poéticas metrificadas de obras ovidianas em língua portuguesa têm demonstrado certa preferência pelo dístico vernáculo, engendrado por Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos (1964), composto por verso alexandrino sucedido de decassílabo. Seguindo este modelo, apresentamos nossa proposta de transposição criativa para a carta de Fílis a Demofonte (Ep. 2), elaborada com base nas considerações de alguns tradutores-poetas que se serviram deste mesmo arranjo e nos pressupostos teórico-metodológicos norteadores da prática da tradução poética, segundo Roman Jakobson (1969), Samuel Levin (1978) e José Paulo Paes (2008). Abstract To translate the Latin elegiac couplet, some metrified poetic translations of Ovidian works into Portuguese have shown a preference for the vernacular couplet created by Péricles Eugênio da Silva Ramos (1964). This couplet is formed by combining one Alexandrine verse followed by a decasyllable. Following this model, we present our proposal of a creative transposto of the letter of Phyllis to Demophoon (Ep. 2), based on the considerations of some poet translators that used the same arrangement and on the theoretical and methodological basis of the practice of poetic translation according to Roman Jakobson (1969), Samuel Levin (1978) and José Paulo Paes (2008).

The author poses a question about what actually is lost in inadequate translations. An elegiac poem by Seamus Heaney, dedicated to the memory of Zbigniew Herbert, is used as an example. The author demonstrates to what degree deficient translation may lead to incorrect comprehension of the poet’s undertaking, and may contribute to wanting interpretations of the poem.

L’article explore la spécificité de l’élégie dans l’œuvre de Carco (poésie, poésie en prose, romans). La dimension plaintive initiale, placée sous l’influence de la poésie élégiaque, de Laforgue à Jammes ou Bataille, est assez tôt travaillée par l’ironie et s’opère un glissement vers la prose, plus apte à exprimer les tourments démoniaques de l’existence urbaine (sexe, alcool, position sociale). L’écriture est un « démon déconcertant »., This article explores the distinct nature of elegy in Carco’s work (poetry, prose poetry, and novels). This initially plaintive dimension, under the influence of elegiac poetry from Laforgue to Jammes and Bataille, is quite early on shaped by irony and undergoes a shift to prose, which is more capable of expressing the demonic torments of urban existence (sex, alcohol, social position). Writing is a “disconcerting demon.”

EnglishThis text goes through some places in the literary work of Apollinaire that are motivated by the urban wanderings of the author. A modernization of the gaze is evident there: invested with an allegorical and mythical bias, in favor of an unusual feeling of estrangement from the banal and the quotidian, it concours to a lyrical, sometimes elegiac, game that the writer establishes between objects and figures, and between the past, the present and the future. The wandering Apollinaire, thus, expresses polysemic depth for lived space and time, over an increasing depersonalization imposed by the modern metropolis. The adhesion of Apollinaire to the forms of urban life reveals, at last, orphic power of lyrical and mythical transfiguration of the present. portuguesEste texto percorre alguns lugares na obra literaria de Apollinaire que sao motivados pelas errâncias urbanas do autor. Uma modernizacao do olhar ali se evidencia: investido de um vies alegorico e mitico, a favor de um inusitado sentimento de estranhamento do banal cotidiano, esse olhar concorre a um jogo lirico, por vezes elegiaco, que o escritor estabelece entre tempos, objetos e figuras. O errante apollinairiano concede, assim, polissemica profundidade para o espaco e o tempo vividos, sobre fundo de uma despersonalizacao crescente imposta pela metropole moderna. A adesao do poeta as formas da vida citadina revela-se, por fim, potencia orfica de transfiguracao lirica e mitica do presente.

This article reads an 1830 poem by William Wordsworth with the aim of exploring his late-life modification of the poetry and poetics of his earlier career. I argue that his poetic commemora...

The question of the place occupied in the history of French poetry by Anthony Deschamps (Antony Deschamps, 1800-1869), a romantic poet almost forgotten already at the end of the 19th century, is examined. Concerning this question, the author of the article turns to the elegy genre leading in the work of Deschamps and in romantic lyrics as a whole establishing the importance of the poet in the context of the history of the French elegy. The relevance of this approach is determined by the fact that insufficient attention is paid to the genre aspect of literary history in French literature of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, which affects the full understanding of the significance of those writers whose merits are related to the genre sphere. Since the factor of personal (rather than a priori given genre) lyricism is very important in the romantic elegy, the article pays great attention to the character of A. Deschan, the opinion of his contemporaries. An analysis of Deschan elegy, comparing them with historically preceding examples of the genre, allows us to conclude that Deschan, unlike poets of the 18th - early 19th centuries, did not create a stable elegiac model similar to, for example, the Lamartinian elegy, but on the contrary, brought romantic principle of creative freedom to life. Largely thanks to such authors, not too remarkable, avoiding high-profile declarations and radical acts, important work was done to turn poetry, strictly regulated by genre norms, into modern lyrics, with its many forms that meet the needs of a flexible embodiment of diverse individual feelings.

The Brazilian Modernism, with its characteristically vanguardist impulse of the decade of the 1920s, reveals the artificiality of the Brazilian nationalistic tradition and opens up new possibilities of usage: by juxtaposing it to the modernizing currents of the twentieth century, the order of this archive is subverted and a new and misplaced national identity takes place. Di-Glauber (1977), an often disregarded documentary by specialized critics in the filmography of Glauber Rocha, offers the opportunity to study the cinematographic realization of an intervention over the aforementioned cultural tradition. Through a re-reading and an elegiac homage to the figure and oeuvre of painter Emiliano Di Cavalcanti, Rocha turns the Modernist procedures over themselves, thus opening the Brazilian archive to the experimentation of a film that claims for itself the disruptive force of its artistic legacy.

Elegy, a genre that has received a special prominence in modern Brazilian poetry, presents in the twentieth century a melancholic, desolate subject with no hope of comfort in the future. This assumption can be noticed in Joaquim Cardozo, author of poems with a highly melancholic and elegiac diction. The aim of this study was to analyze two elegies of this poet, “Elegia para Benedito Monteiro” and “Para Jose Maria (de Albuquerque e Melo)”, especially directed to two fellows who were particularly significant in their poetic activity, and who belonged to a specific group of artists and intellectuals in the 1920s in Recife. In a general way, this review proposed to discuss such elegies from two perspectives: in the first, we sought to understand the poetic processes with which Cardozo takes this genre, and how it reshapes new modulations for the form, indicating the perspectives assumed by him face the propositions of his aesthetic and historical moment; in the second, we tried to trace how such elegies document a group that still deserves to be better discussed by the literary studies. In order to do so, some literary critics were used to study this poet from Pernambuco and the modern poetry from this place, such as Souza Barros (1972), Merquior (1996), Correia (2018).

Resumo: O presente artigo examina como, a partir das primeiras influencias do humanismo italiano, os autores portugueses traduziram e imitaram os generos antigos. Examina especificamente o modo como esses autores buscaram correspondentes metricos e estroficos portugueses para reproduzir aspectos formais ou funcionais dos metros antigos. Tendo como base os conceitos de correspondencia funcional e formal apresentados por Britto (2016), compara os metros vernaculos aos antigos quanto a forma e aos contextos em que sao utilizados. Conclui que o uso de correspondencias funcionais foi predominante nesse periodo, apontando, entretanto, para o carater relativo dessas duas formas de correspondencia e para a dinâmica que subjaz ao processo de apropriacao de formas estrangeiras. Palavras-chave: correspondencias metricas; hexâmetro; distico elegiaco; metros portugueses; seculos XVI e XVII. Abstract: This paper examines how, from the first influences of the Italian humanism, Portuguese authors translated and imitated the ancient genres. It examines specifically the way in which these authors used Portuguese metrical and strophic correspondents to reproduce formal or functional aspects of the ancient meters. Based on the concepts of functional and formal correspondence presented by Britto (2016), it compares the vernacular meters to the ancient concerning both the form and the contexts in which they are used. It concludes that the use of functional correspondences was predominant in this period, pointing, however, to the relative character of these two forms of correspondence and to the dynamics that underlies the process of appropriation of foreign forms. Keywords: metric correspondences; hexameter; elegiac couple; Portuguese meters; sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

New presidential administrations are often accompanied by a change of journalistic guard.1 For the Obama years, it was the emergence to prominence of the African American writer-journalist Ta-Nehis...

The article analyzes the features of transformation of ballad genre form in modern Russian poetry. Relying on theoretical propositions about the specifics of the genre, developed in the works of Yu. N. Tynianov and M. M. Bakhtin, the nature of changes in the features of the genre of ballad are explored in the creative practice of poets of the turn of 20 th -21 st centuries. The study found that the genre “image” of ballad is directly related to the feature of the modern poetic process, in which there are “traditional” and “avant-garde” paradigms. It is noted that in the works of poets-traditionalists (E. Rein, O. Khlebnikov, O. Nikolaeva, S. Kekova, D. Bykov, etc.) is dominated by a variant of the lyrical ballad, which has a philosophical, elegiac nature, and a special drama and tension are associated here with nostalgic sadness about the past, the loss of ties to the past, discomfort in the present. It is shown that the works of avant-garde poets (T. Kibirov, E. Schvarts, F. Svarovsky, A. Rovinsky, D. Vodennikov etc.) often decanonize genre characteristics of romantic ballads. It is emphasized that through the genre synthesis of ballad, lyrical cycle, parable, and fable the avant-garde poets demonstrate the instability of the era of the late 20 th century, the confusion of a man caught in the maelstrom of socio-political events. Analyzing the work of poets, the authors prove that, unlike the poets-traditionalists, the representatives of the avant-garde trend abandon traditional lyricism and actively use all the variety of postmodern techniques.

This essay explores how Charlotte Smith transports lines and themes from her Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1800) to transform her narrative of personal history in her final poem, Beachy Head (1807). While her personal history is inextricably connected to her relationship with the land in both works, Beachy Head offers a version of her history that is embedded in a much wider context of the geological history of the landscape. This prompts a reflection on the telling and reading of histories that complicates and recasts Smith's representation of both herself and the land, as she recognizes both to be dynamic.

This article examines a sequence of four elegiac couplets and two iambic senarii that was etched into the northern wall of the basilica in Pompeii. I argue that this graffito was produced by multiple writers and that it alludes to characters familiar from elegy and Roman comedy. More specifically, the inscription's different blocks of text are attributable to three separate stock types: a lena who recommends locking out the lover who comes without gifts; an exclusus amator who is determined to persevere; and a slave who mocks his owner with the sarcasm he characteristically displays in the fabula palliata.

Charlotte Smith composed her Elegiac Sonnets (1784–1797)—a text increasingly recognized as foundational to British Romanticism—at a time when the significations of pedestrian travel were sh...

Resumo: O presente trabalho contem breve estudo sobre o prefacio do livro II de O rapto de Proserpina , do poeta alexandrino Claudio Claudiano. Busca analisar a presenca de Orfeu e seu hino a Hercules, numa narrativa de epica mitologica, cujo tema e o rapto da filha de Ceres por Plutao. A forma do prefacio, em disticos elegiacos, tambem e focalizada e se justifica pelo conteudo desse poema-preludio, um verdadeiro hino de triunfo a chegada de Hercules a Tracia e a harmonizacao da natureza, pelo canto de Orfeu. As potencialidades do metro, em que o solene hexâmetro e seguido pelo enfatico pentâmetro, nas penas de um habilidoso escritor, e o que garante o tom de lamento e exaltacao que antecipa o sofrimento da raptada e a alegria do raptor. Palavras-Chave: O rapto de Proserpina ; Claudio Claudiano; prefacio do livro II; Orfeu; Hercules; distico elegiaco. Abstract: The present work contains a brief study of the preface to Book II of The Abduction of Proserpine , by the Alexandrian poet Claudius Claudianus. It seeks to analyze the presence of Orpheus and his hymn to Hercules through the narrative of a mythological story, whose theme is the abduction of the daughter of Ceres by Pluto. The form of the preface, in elegiac couplets, is focused on and justified by a poem-prelude, a triumphal hymn to the arrival of Hercules to Thrace, and to the harmonization of Nature by the song of Orpheus. In the writing feathers of a skilled writer, it is the potentialities of the rhythm, in which the solemn hexameter is followed by the emphatic pentameter, that guarantees the tone of lament and exaltation that anticipates the suffering of the abducted and the joy of the abductor. Keywords: The Abduction of Proserpine ; Claudius Claudianus; Preface of the Book II; Orpheus; Hercules; elegiac couple.

For William Wordsworth, a poet preoccupied with the theme of loss, the notion of consolation remains one of the central concerns of his poetry. This article analyzes how the Arab dream episode of T...

In the eighteen years since 9/11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, art composers have created over one hundred composition attempting to come to terms with this tragic even...

This paper proposes that the highly innovative panoramic cross-axial architectural compositions in Roman monumental and villa architecture come about very rapidly in stages from mid-3rd to late 1st centuries B.C. in a world in which a very mobile and cosmopolitan Roman senatorial elite and a Hellenisticroyal elite, with their professional staffs, formed a unitary, multi-polar international culture. The developmentof axial compositions, vs. mid-space compositional volumes of classical Greece, began in the 280s in Ptolemaic Egypt with Greek forms modified by influence of New Kingdom axial sanctuaries. From the mid-3rd to mid-2nd centuries enclosed agorai and sanctuaries develop cross-axial, often outward-facing panoramic designs (Lindos, Kos, Pergamon). From mid-2nd century, the innovative energy, the resources, and sometimes the architects, pass to the intensely competitive political environment of the Late Roman Republic (after the architects, pass to the intensely competitive political environment of the Late Roman Republic (after Pydna in 168 and the sieges of Corinth and Carthage in 146 B.C.). Axial, and soon cross-axial sanctuary and forum designs proliferate (Porticus Metelli, Gabii, Tivoli, Praenest, Forum of Caesar), usually in part inward facing,sometimes outward facing and panoramic (Praeneste, Tivoli). Such large compositions begin to affect large villa design by mid-1st century (Villa of the Papyri) and only after c. 50–30 B.C. panoramic outwardfacing colonnaded designs begin to be seen in architectural vignettes in wall painting (Villa San Marco, Stabiae), and actual villas (later additions to Oplontis, modifications and new villas at Stabiae, at the same time that there is an intense interest in elegiac landscape painting (Odyssey landscapes) and bucolic nature (Virgil,Georgics, c. 29 B.C.). The phenomenon seems to be a unified Mediterranean wide feature of elite culture since the same begins to be seen at Masada and Caesarea Maritima after Actium (31 B.C.).

This essay examines the legacy of gay playwright and activist Robert Chesley through an in-depth look at his most controversial play, Jerker, or The Helping Hand (1986), uncovering a unique strand of safe-sex advocacy that emphasized sound—and the voice specifically—to manifest queer desire. Phone sex, or dial-a-porn, as it was first called, rose to popularity in the 1980s amid the AIDS crisis. Chesley's depiction of it onstage reimagined the pornographic address, unleashing it from the visual primacy of video porn of the time to foreground elegiac, pedagogic, and ethical dimensions. The broadcast of Jerker on radio station KPFK-FM, however, spurred a legal redefinition of indecency in 1987 and further imperiled safe-sex advocacy that refused to skirt eroticism. In an era when “Silence = Death,” Chesley's Jerker revealed the complexities of the mediated voice as a tool for survival, remembrance, and unbounded pleasure.

Late medieval English traditions of Troy material are each anti-Virgilian, and therefore anti-imperialist. The three principal Troy traditions in late medieval British writing are as follows: (i) the elegiac tradition of Ovid's "Heroides" (pre-2 BCE); (ii) the tragic tradition, derived from Guido delle Colonne's "Historia destructionis Troiae" (1287); and (iii) the Galfridian tradition, derived from Geoffrey of Monmouth's "Historia Regum Britanniae" (1136). The anti-Virgilian, anti-imperialist thesis applies to each tradition. In the elegiac tradition anti-Virgilianism and indifference to the imperialist enterprise are all but explicit. In the second, tragic tradition, Trojan narratives are not anti-militarist, but they are fundamentally anti-imperialist: imperialist claims derived from Virgil, and an aggressive chivalric ethos, are, for authors in this tradition, extremely dangerous. The third late medieval British Troy tradition, the pseudo-historical tradition of Geoffrey of Monmouth, seems, on the face of it, both imperialist and para-Virgilian. Even here, however, Virgilian imperialism turns to catastrophe; the energies that might lead to imperial ambition in fact provoke lethal internal fractures within the imperial polity. This tradition is initially drawn to the Virgilian project, but finally repelled by it.

A Renaissance sonneteer conventionally describes a sublime love for an idealised woman, who is often unconquerable. However, Shakespeare's sonnets addressed to a woman reveal her sexual nature and ugliness of her figure and character, while those dedicated to a man idealise love. Apart from this most obvious distinction, Shakespeare's sonnets are more personal and elegiac than all the sonnets of his predecessors, due to the poet's expressed obsession with the devastating effect of time. The author of the paper will focus on such Shakespeare's expressions, especially on those sonnets in which the fear of death, mutability, and transience of life are the dominant feelings. By selecting these general motifs for the analysis, the traditional classification of Shakespeare's sonnets into those dedicated to a man (1-126) and those addressed to the Dark Lady (127-154) will be avoided.

The paper reads Stoppard’s work in the 21st century as further testimony of the gradual politicisation of his work that began in the 1970s under the influence of Czech dissidents, and particularly as a result of his visits to Russia and Prague in 1977. It also provides evidence that Stoppard, since the 1990s, had begun to target emotional responses from his audience to redress the intellectual cool that seems to have shaped his earlier, “absurdist” phase. This turn towards emotionalism, the increasingly elegiac obsession with doubles, unrequited lives, and memory are linked to a set of biographical turning points: the death of his mother and the investigation into his Czech-Jewish family roots, which laid bare the foundations of the Stoppardian art. Examining this kind of “phantom pain” in two of his 21st-century plays, Rock’n’Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2019), the essay argues that Stoppard’s work in the 21st century was increasingly coloured by his biography and Jewishness—bringing to the fore an important engagement with European history that helped Stoppard become aware of some blind spots in his attitudes towards Englishness.

Both Protestantism and Catholicism of the seventeenth century experienced the influence of theology that stressed the importance of inner devotion, which went hand in hand with a strong emphasis on the emotional experience of faith. In dealing with death, however, the discourse of comfort was still dominant, designed to suppress the pain of loss rather than bringing that feeling to the fore. This ‘emotional regime’ also affected funeral elegiac poems in which feelings of joy and delight about the deceased’s heavenly destination dominate the initial period of grief. This article aims to understand whether these emotional regimes induced a form of emotional suffering and, if so, to what extent this was visible in contemporary funerary poetry: did, for example, it stick to grief and the inner pain of loss instead of suppressing it? The essay focuses on the elegiac poems by Jeremias de Decker (1609-1660) in the Dutch Republic and by Michiel de Swaen (1654-1707) in French Flanders. It examines the striking differences between the elegies written after the passing away of a public person, such as befriended priests and preachers, and the poems about a death in the private sphere in which poetry functioned more as a means of emotional refuge.

John Clare’s poem Remembrances is an elegiac lament not just for a childhood gone, but also for the irrevocable loss of access to nature. The poem mourns the impact of the acts of enclosure which took place in the English countryside from the 17th Century onward, which upturned centuries of tradition of the open field system by parcelling land off to private farmers and landlords, thereby exiling the commoner from the land. Clare’s words speak to a long-standing relationship between the forces of populism, which imagine a political and social divide between the ‘elite’ and the ‘people’, and ecologism, an ideology which seeks to rebalance human-nature relations and advocate against environmental degradation. This relationship between populism and ecologism contains multitudes. As this short commentary argues, populist ecologies appear in various forms, but one common thread which ties together 19th Century populist ecologies with that of their 21st Century counterparts, is that they are all rooted in some form of exile from nature.

In Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, Michael MacDonald and Alexander Murphy argue that the sentimentalization of death in the eighteenth century fostered a certain degree of sympathy for suicide, reaching its “zenith” with the death of Thomas Chatterton in 1771. Traditional English elegy is both the poetry of death and the poetry of mourning. Conventional readings describe elegy as an attempt to complete the process of mourning, with the poem culminating in an acceptance of the beloved’s death and a revelation of the poet’s particular poetic power. Male friendship is the standard focus of the English elegiac tradition, which is contoured in this sense around the homosocial. As such, women are typically neither mourner nor mourned in the public spaces of elegiac discourse, especially in the pastoral tradition. Indeed, the lines are contoured by absence, as “no friend” and “no kind domestic tear” mourn the loss of the unnamed woman.

In ‘The Dark Ecology of Elegy’ (2010) Timothy Morton suggests a radical notion of incomplete mourning for the planet. That we must mourn, and do mourn, through our literature, before the full loss of environment, a human home becoming increasingly ‘unhomely’. He says, ‘The really difficult elegiac work would consist in bringing into full consciousness the reality of human and nonhuman interdependence, in a manner that threatens the comfortable way in which humans appear in the foreground and everything else in the background.’ (256) In this piece, I aim to explore how this idea can be illuminated by the notion in Freud’s ‘Uncanny’ (1919) that the uncanny impression can be created by an unexpected shift in position, (‘in which one does not know where one is’) in this case the position of the reader or writer in relation by the power of a ‘speculative’ fiction to evoke mourning. I will also draw on the work of Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok (1994) in their work on mourning and melancholia and the concepts of ‘introjection’ and ‘incorporation’. I want to propose the term ‘speculative elegy’ in relation to certain kinds of climate change or environmental fictions, including the one briefly mentioned by Freud himself in his essay, the short story ‘Inexplicable’ by L. G. Moberly (1917). Such fictions uncannily project and mourn for a natural world not yet passed and disrupt the comfortable and fantastic separation between human and ‘nature’.