Professor Stephen Regan‌

Stephen Regan is Professor of English at Durham University. His main teaching and research interests are in modern British, Irish, and American literature. He has written extensively about elegy and the poetry of mourning, and he teaches a special MA topic on elegy at Durham. His publications include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford University Press, 2004), The Nineteenth Century Novel: A Critical Reader (Routledge 2001), and Philip Larkin: The New Casebook (Macmillan 1997). He has recently completed The Sonnet (a critical history of the sonnet from the Renaissance to the present) for Oxford University Press, and is currently editing The Penguin Book of Elegy.

‘Inventions of Farewell’: Mourning the Dead in Modern Elegy

Elegy, as a poetic form traditionally associated with mourning the dead, has always questioned its own efficacy in assuaging grief and offering consolation to the bereaved. To make the dead live again has been the perpetual aim of elegy, and that audacious gesture has prompted both wonder and scepticism. Whether in the classical myths of seasonal renewal, in the Christian miracle of resurrection, or in the secular realm of memory, elegy has sought transcendence in the face of death. At the same time, an assertion of doubt about the compensatory power of song and lyric has been a persistent feature of the genre, as much a convention of the elegy as the imagined laying of flowers or the customary conversation with the dead. In recent times, and especially since 1945, the tendency of the elegy to question its own verbal adequacy and its own ethical, compensatory value has intensified. The idealising memorial tendencies associated with elegy have been sceptically regarded, if not brutally rejected, in a good deal of post-war poetry. This is hardly surprising, given the overwhelming loss of life in two world wars and the gradual erosion of traditional religious observance. Even so, there has been a deeply felt public need in our own time for sustaining rituals of mourning and a persistent readiness to draw upon the consoling powers of art and song in the face of loss. This lecture will explore the powerful ways in which modern poets since 1945 have created a language and a style in which to mourn the dead. In showing how modern poetry can be both consoling and self-questioning, it will draw upon some of the most moving and compelling elegies by recent British, Irish, and American writers.