Facing Loss and Death: Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry

Peter Hühn

Published by De Gruyter 2016

Facing Loss and Death

Narrative and Eventfulness in Lyric Poetry

Peter Hühn
With contributions by: Britta Goerke , Heilna du Plooy and Stefan Schenk-Haupt

Volume 55 in the series Narratologia

https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110486339

Overview
Contents

About this book

Lyric poetry as a temporal art-form makes pervasive use of narrative elements in organizing the progressive course of the poetic text. This observation justifies the application of the advanced methodology of narratology to the systematic analysis of lyric poems. After a concise presentation of this transgeneric approach to poetry, the study sets out to demonstrate its practical fruitfulness in detailed analyses of a large number of English (and some American) poems from the early modern period to the present. The narratological approach proves particularly suited to focus on the hitherto widely neglected dimension of sequentiality, the dynamic progression of the poetic utterance and its eventful turns, which largely constitute the raison d'être of the poem. To facilitate comparisons, the examples chosen share one special thematic complex, the traumatic experience of severe loss: the death of a beloved person, the imminence of one’s own death, the death of a revered fellow-poet and the loss of a fundamental stabilizing order. The function of the poems can be described as facing the traumatic experience in the poetic medium and employing various coping strategies. The poems thus possess a therapeutic impetus.

Author / Editor information

Peter Hühn, Universität Hamburg, Germany.

Reviews

"Peter Hühn, renommierter Lyrik- und Narratologiespezialist zugleich, hat mit diesem Band, in Zusammenarbeit mit Britta Goerke, Heilna du Plooy und Stefan Schenk-Haupt, ein konzises Werk vorgelegt, in dem zahlreiche klassische Gedichte der englischsprachigen Literatur ausführlicher behandelt werden. [...] Ein nützliches, anregendes Buch also, das geeignet ist, zu einer genaueren Lektüre von Gedichten beizutragen, unabhängig davon, wie stark man jeweils das narrative Element wirklich machen möchte."
Till Kinzel in: Informationsmittel (IFB) : digitales Rezensionsorgan für Bibliothek und Wissenschaft [#5560] http://informationsmittel-fuer-bibliotheken.de/showfile.php?id=9005

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	I
Table of Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	V
1. Introduction Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. Mourning the Death of a Beloved Person
2.0. Introduction Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	17
2.1. Ben Jonson: “On My First Daughter” (1593) and “On My First Son” (1603) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2.2. John Donne: “Since She Whom I Loved” (1617) and John Milton: “Methought I Saw My Late Espoused Saint” (1658) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	25
2.3. Lord Byron: “Away, Away, Ye Notes of Woe” (1811) and “And Thou art Dead, as Young and Fair” (1812) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	30
2.4. Edgar Allan Poe: “Lenore” (1844–1849) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	37
2.5. Seamus Heaney: “Mid-Term Break” (1966) Heilna du Plooy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	41
2.6. Eavan Boland: “The Blossom” (1998) and “The Pomegranate” (1994) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
2.7. Summary Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	54
3. Coping with Loss in Love
3.0. Introduction Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	63
3.1. William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
3.2. John Donne: “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning” (1633) Stefan Schenk-Haupt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	79
3.3. William Wordsworth: “Lucy Poems” (1800, 1801/1807) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	84
3.4. Emily Dickinson: “After Great Pain” (ca. 1862) Heilna du Plooy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	94
3.5. Thomas Hardy: “The Voice” (1912/14) Britta Goerke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
3.6. Sylvia Plath: “The Other” (1962) Stefan Schenk-Haupt Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	107
3.7. Ted Hughes: Birthday Letters (1998) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	114
3.8. Summary Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	132
4. Confronting One’s Own Death
4.0. Introduction Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
4.1. Sir Walter Raleigh: “Verses Made the Night before He Died” (1618) and Chidiock Tichborne: “Elegy” (1586) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	143
4.2. John Donne: “What if this Present were the World’s Last Night” (1609/1611) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	148
4.3. William Cowper: “The Castaway” (1799/1800) Britta Goerke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	152
4.4. John Keats: “When I have Fears that I May Cease to be” (1818) and Lord Byron: “On this Day I Complete my Thirty-Sixth Year” (1824) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	162
4.5. Emily Dickinson: “Because I Could not Stop for Death” (ca. 1863) Heilna du Plooy Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
4.6. Rupert Brooke: “The Soldier” (1914) and Wilfred Owen: “Strange Meeting” (1918) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	174
4.7. D. H. Lawrence: “Bavarian Gentians” (1932) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
4.8. Summary Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	185
5. Lamenting the Death of Poets
5.0. Introduction Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
5.1. Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey: “An Excellent Epitaph of Sir Thomas Wyatt” (1542) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	195
5.2. Thomas Carew: “An Elegy upon the Death of the Dean of Paul’s, Dr John Donne” (1633) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	199
5.3. Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats” (1821) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	206
5.4. W. H. Auden: “In Memory of W. B. Yeats” (1939) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	212
5.5. Seamus Heaney: “Audenesque: in memory of Joseph Brodsky” (1996) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
5.6. Summary Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	222
6. Thematizing the Loss of an Old Order
6.0. Introduction Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	229
6.1. John Donne: An Anatomy of the World (1611) and William Shakespeare: The Sonnets (1609) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	232
6.2. William Wordsworth: “The World is too Much with Us” (1807) and W. B. Yeats: “High Talk” (1939) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	242
6.3. Percy Bysshe Shelley: “Lift not the Painted Veil” (1818/1824) and “The Cloud” (1819/1820) Britta Goerke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	250
6.4. Matthew Arnold: “Dover Beach” (1851) and Gerard Manley Hopkins: “No Worst, there is None” (ca. 1885) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	264
6.5. T. S. Eliot: The Waste Land (1922) and “Journey of the Magi” (1930) Britta Goerke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	275
6.6. W. B. Yeats: “Lapis Lazuli” (1938) Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
6.7. Tony Harrison: “A Kumquat for John Keats” (1981) Britta Goerke Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	301
6.8. Summary Peter Hühn Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	311
7. Conclusion: Summary and Results Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319
Index (authors and titles) Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	331

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: De Gruyter
Audience: Literary scholars in English and American studies (also German, Romance, and Slavic studies)
Pages
- Front matter: 6
- Main content: 332
Keywords: Poetry analysis; transgeneric narratology; eventfulness; sequentiality

eBook

Published: August 22, 2016
ISBN: 9783110486339

Hardcover

Published: August 22, 2016
ISBN: 9783110484229