Seminar reading
The syllabus below is now complete: reading will be uploaded throughout the module.
Week 1: Introduction: Auden, Bishop, Heaney
Marilyn Hacker, 'Can Poetry Console a Grieving Public'?
Week 2: William Wordsworth, elegies for John
Wordsworth, Essays on Epitaphs (extracts)
Duncan Wu, 'I only look'd for pain and grief', from Wordsworth: An Inner Life (2002)
Week 3: John Clare, enclosure elegies
Jonathan Bate, John Clare: A Biography (2003), extract
Week 4: P. B. Shelley, Adonais
Peter Sacks, 'Adonais', in The English Elegy
Week 5: Tennyson, In Memoriam [focus on stanzas 1-5, 7-8, 10-15, 21-23, 35-37, 40, 43-44, 57, 68-70, 74, 77, 88-90, 97, 113, 119, 124, 130-1]
Paul Monette, Love Alone: Eighteen Elegies for Rog
Matthew Curr, The Consolation of Otherness
Week 6: G. M. Hopkins, The Wreck of the Deutschland
Joshua King, 'Hopkins' Affective Rhythm: Grace and Intention in Tension,' Victorian Poetry, 45.3 (2007) (Project MUSE)
Week 7: Constantine Cavafy, elegies
'Voices'; 'Desires'; 'Candles'; 'An Old Man'; 'Supplication'; 'The Souls of Old Men'; 'The Windows'; 'Walls'; 'The Funeral of Sarpedon'; 'The City'; 'The Ides of March'; 'Finished'; 'Ithaca'; 'The Footsteps'; 'Morning Sea'; 'The Tobacconist's Window'; 'In the evening'; 'Outside the House'; 'Body, Remember...'; 'The Afternoon Sun'; 'In Despair'; 'Before they are changed by time'
Week 8: Roland Barthes, Mourning Diary
Marcel Proust, The Way by Swann's, trans. Lydia Davies (2003), extract
Week 9: Elizabeth Jennings, elegies
Jean Ward, 'Elizabeth Jennings: An Exile in her own Country?', Literature and Theology, 21.2 (2007) 
Week 10: Douglas Dunn, Elegies
Diana Fuss, 'Last Words', ELH, 76.4 (2009) (Project MUSE)
