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Mirroring the Future Adonais, Elegy, and the Life in Letters - Critical Essay
Criticism, Summer, 2000 by Michele Turner Sharp
IN ELEGY, A POETIC VOICE confronts the threat of its own dissolution, and works to forge an enduring, living form by which its author merits inclusion in a pantheon of the poets. Elegy is an inaugural genre, most attractive to a poet on the cusp of his (or her) literary career. From the outset, Adonais, the pastoral elegy that Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote for his fellow poet, John Keats, strikes an odd note. It was written at a time when pastoral elegy had become both obsolete and explicitly maligned. Furthermore, Adonais comes from the pen of a poet not just mature but even infamous. Alastor, the long elegiac poem that anchors Shelley's first published poetic work, comes closer to fitting the traditional pattern. Though ending on a dismal note, Alastor marks a poetic birth, not least of all through a pointed refusal of the traditional tropes of elegy that defines the terrain of Shelley's own surpassing genius. Five years later, however, in Adonais, Shelley adopts the conventions of pastoral elegy with a tenacious energy. The resulting poem has struck many as bound by mortality and marked by despair. Rather than going forward, like Milton's Swain, "to flesh Woods, and Pastures new," Adonais is by turns tired out, overwrought, and spectacularly suicidal.
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To understand Adonais, a poem so fiercely traditional that it seems anachronistic, we need to consider both its handling of the conventions that it inherits from the tradition of pastoral elegy and how Shelley's use of them reflects and responds to the condition of the poet in the early nineteenth century Shelley's poem is driven by the profound shifts in the profession of poetry occasioned by the rise of print culture and a marketplace of letters. These developments altered relations between readers, writers, and texts. Whereas the manuscript circles wherein literary work circulated in an earlier age allowed writers a high degree of influence over both the material dimensions of their texts and how they might be read, print culture opened these intimate relations to third parties such as publishers, printers, and periodical review. Adonais, as it frames the death of Keats in the context of a vicious paper war, makes these concerns central to its elegiac work. As Shelley knew from his own experience, publishers and reviewers shaped the field of reading and writing in distinctive ways, and with palpable impact on writers' lives. In a larger sense, weaker bonds between writers and readers, and the emerging strength of the market allowed writers and readers to imagine each other differently. Readers gained increased sway as buyers and consumers of literary material, and writers acquired cultural prominence, or notoriety, as the owners of their works.
In recent years, discussion of elegy, with Peter Sacks's The English Elegy at the forefront, has addressed the genre in the context of psychoanalytic models that structure maturation, both personal and poetic.(1) Sacks's work revitalized the study of elegy by freeing it from a dry cataloguing of conventions, on the one hand, and from an overemphasis on expression that eclipsed the author's participation in a public generic discourse, on the other. Linking literary performance, psychoanalytic development, and the anthropology of mourning, Sacks gave critics an impressive handling of the conventions of elegy in the context of a powerful interpretive model. A number of critics, however, have complained that this model is too narrow to accommodate the full range of elegiac utterance, and that it falls short of the real quality of lived experience with loss. Critics working with elegies by women argue that an oedipal model fails to account for how elegies by women may embody a different set of conventions and an alternative conception of purpose.(2) Critics working with modern and contemporary elegies, which often deviate significantly from Sacks's norm, take issue with a too rigid demarcation of normative and pathological forms of mourning. Jahan Ramazani, for example, in his Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, suggests that mourning and melancholia are contrasting emphases within mourning and its successful literary expression. For Ramazani, "melancholic mourning" is both a more apt description of lived experiences with loss and a more accurate description of the anti-elegiac shapes of the modern elegy. In the modern era, Ramazani argues, melancholia or anger may provide the elegist with his or her only and best recourse to effectively mourn the dead in the midst of a fast-paced culture intent on forgetting them.(3)
The problem of memory and adequate commemoration under the stress of modern culture has likewise prompted Dominick LaCapra to posit a revised and enlarged concept of mourning or working through. In History, Theory, Trauma: Representing the Holocaust, LaCapra argues that a successful work of mourning--one that honors the dead and avoids denial--must recognize "loss that cannot be made good: scars that will not disappear and even wounds that will not heal."(4) In History and Memory after Auschwitz, LaCapra expands on this notion. He defines successful working through as an act of memory that recognizes differences between the present and the past, and that enacts a performative relation to the past, remembering and taking leave of it in a way that allows for critical judgment and a reinvestment in social life; but he also argues that it may only proceed by acting out or falling silent. For LaCapra, an expanded notion of mourning that clears a place for melancholia and silence is the only way to invest the process with an appropriate ethical dimension, respecting others and otherness, and resisting the tendency to reduce real, historical trauma to an illustrative or explanatory instance of larger, ahistorical patterns which appear in many societies and many contexts across a broad time frame.(5)
