Elegies: Poems of Memory, Loss, and Praise

Dating back to the literary traditions of Ancient Greece, an elegy is a poem honoring loss, either public or private. Walt Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," written after the death of Abraham Lincoln, is among the most well-known American elegies. W.H. Auden honored Yeats and Freud in elegies; after 9/11, many American poets, including Billy Collins and Martin Espada, responded to this national loss through their poems. In a recent anthology, The Art of Losing, Kevin Young asserts that such work reminds us that poetry is a "necessity" since elegies "reveal the many ways poets seek to find words and form to contain loss." In this seminar, we will look at examples of elegies written by a range of poets. We will also read and discuss poems written by members of the class that reflect this topic.

Margaret Mackinnon is the author of two collections of poetry, The Invented Child (Silverfish Review Press 2013), winner of the 2014 Literary Award in Poetry from the Library of Virginia, and Afternoon in Cartago (Ashland Poetry Press 2022), winner of the Richard Snyder Memorial Publication Prize. Her work has appeared in The Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, Image, Poetry, Blackbird, and other journals. She attended Vassar College and the University of North Carolina, and she received her MFA in poetry from the University of Florida. She lives with her family in Richmond.