Sustaining Elegy

Chapter 4 explores Wordsworth’s poems and drafts related to the death of his brother John. It reads these poems with and against prevailing accounts of elegy, showing how Wordsworth’s poems variously accord with and challenge their broadly psychoanalytic logic. The chapter traces critical accounts of elegy back to Freud’s model of mourning, noting both its generative qualities and its limitations. In particular, psychoanalytic accounts of mourning foreclose our capacity to imagine what might be termed elegiac surprise. The chapter goes on to locate in Wordsworth’s writing a distinctly different logic; his grief poems do not abandon or even memorialize John, but uncover in verse fresh traces of a lost brother. Wordsworth reimagines the metapsychology of the elegy and the life of his late brother in the same gesture.