Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry

Lost Loss in American Elegiac Poetry: Tracing Inaccessible Grief from Stevens to Post-9/11 examines unconventional elegies of losses that are “lost” on us, discussing what it means to “lose” loss and what happens when dispossessory experiences go unacknowledged or become inaccessible. Toshiaki Komura analyzes a range of “oddball” elegiac poetry that does not neatly align with conventional assumptions about the genre, including Wallace Stevens’ “The Owl in the Sarcophagus,” Sylvia Plath’s last poems, Elizabeth Bishop’s “Geography III,” Sharon Olds’ “The Dead and the Living,” Louise Glück’s “Averno,” and poems written after 9/11. Komura studies the intersection of the personal and the communal, beginning with the mechanism of cognitive myth-making involved in denied grief and ending with its social and ethical implications. Engaging with a range of philosophical and psychological theories, Komura elucidates how poetry gives shape to the vague despondency of unrecognized loss and what kind of phantomic effects these equivocal grieving experiences may create.