"Comic self-consciousness": Oblique approaches to the elegiac

Abstract

This critical essay explores indirect approaches to heavy themes in contemporary elegiac poetry. Whereas traditional elegists focused on death, contemporary elegiac poems deal with loss in a broader sense. The challenge contemporary elegiac poets take on is to engage with feeling but without veering into sentimentality. I will explore how two contemporary poets, Billy Collins and William Matthews, approach loss indirectly to evade sentimentality. Specifically, I will argue that Collins and Matthews, both of whom are noted for their elegiac orientation and their use of wit, engage with loss through three strategies: the postponement of acknowledging the loss central to the poem, the use of incongruities manifesting as humour and irony, and by gaining the reader’s complicity through the use of metapoetics. I will argue contemporary elegiac poetry succeeds in evading sentimentality without reducing its emotional stake when poets take such indirect approaches to loss. This seems to be what an effective contemporary elegiac poem does: it draws us in with its humour or light-heartedness, gets us invested or interested in a subject that is amusing or familiar or without a necessary connection to the weight of the emotion, then shifts to its more serious stake.