Beschreibung
With the removal of death from the public sphere, mourning
has become a private matter. At the same time, particularly
in poetry, the trend is reversed. An intensely elegiac
quality and a focus on absence, death and loss can be
observed in contemporary Anglophone poetry.
This study shows
the poetry of Andrew Motion in the context of the
contemporary elegy, a genre which is at a crossroads between
the anti-consolatory refusal to mourn, the inability to move
past grief, and the strong wish for redemption from grief.
Motion’s poetry, which mainly deals with pre-emptive
attempts to cope with loss, can be seen as a typical example
for the contemporary melancholy mood in poetry.
