Chapter 4 - Confronting Death

Summary

Benjamin Franklin's parodic ingredients summarize the artistic failings of the Puritan elegy as post-Enlightenment critics have defined them. The paradox of observing a death in time by invoking the supposed timelessness of art helps explain why critics have never known quite what to do with occasional poems like elegies. Most elegists during sixteenth century took an approach to verbal mourning that drew on Elizabethan patriotism and patronage and, later, Jacobean melancholy and popular devotional traditions. The New England elegy began to separate from its English counterparts by laying greater stress on the commemoration of what William Scheick has called a collective self that enabled survivors to absorb the deceased's piety. With social and political themes pervading the full range of elegiac verse, the chief distinction in American elegy became and largely remains between poems designed for popular audiences and those written for a more traditionally literary readership.