Overview

The comprehensive guide to a deeply human tradition of memory, mourning and consolation Elegy is among the world's oldest forms of literature- a continuous poetic tradition which stretches back beyond the time of Virgil and Horace to Ancient Greece, speaking eloquently and movingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. In perhaps the purest instance of art's fundamental 'impulse to preserve' (Philip Larkin), it gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate for long, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp. In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, selecting the best and most significant poems and poets from the Classical roots of elegy, and from its Renaissance revival down to the present day. They show how this remarkably resilient and versatile form has continued to adapt itself even as society and religious belief have shifted around it, with striking achievements in the work of twentieth- and twenty-first-century poets as different as Marianne Moore, Dylan Thomas, Denise Riley and Gwendolyn Brooks. The result is the only comprehensive anthology of its kind now available in the English language. The Penguin Book of Elegy is itself a work of preservation - and a profound and moving catalogue of the fundamentally human urges to remember and honour the dead, and give comfort to those who survive them.

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9780241269602

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Reviews

If you have any weakness for poetry at all this book will draw you in then devastate you -- Susie Goldsbrough * The Times * Poignant … memorable … impressively fresh and compelling ... the reader is bound to come away from a collection like this asking what the poetry of lament might help to teach us about the task of grieving for the threatened loss of an entire world -- Rowan Williams * New Statesman * A magnificent reminder of the permanence of love -- Bel Mooney * Daily Mail * The giants of the genre are well presented … there are discoveries aplenty … so monumental is this anthology that one can imagine it pillowing a knight’s head on an elaborately carved marble tomb -- Anthony Gardner * Tablet * Funny, angry and provocative … the anthology is a success ... the editors’ introduction is excellent – clear, informative and thought-provoking -- Sean O’Brien * Telegraph *

Author Information

Andrew Motion (Author) Andrew Motion is the former Poet Laureate, co-founded the Poetry Archive and was knighted for his services to literature in 2009. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and lives in London. Stephen Regan (Author) Stephen Regan's books include Irish Writing- An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (2004) and The Sonnet (2019). He has taught at Ruskin College, Oxford; Royal Holloway, University of London; and Durham University, where he is Professor Emeritus. He is currently a Research Associate at the University of Melbourne

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