Books.org participates in affiliate programs including Bookshop.org and the Amazon Services LLC Associates Program. We may earn a commission from qualifying purchases made through links on this page, at no additional cost to you.
Synopsis
"Death has always served as one of the most powerful catalysts for poetry. Whether with Dylan Thomas, counseling readers to "Rage, rage against the dying of the light," or with Walt Whitman, taking comfort in the serene arrival "sooner or later" of "delicate death," poets throughout history have faced the mortal losses that all of us inevitably encounter. Inventions of Farewell collects English-language poems of mourning from the late Middle Ages to the present. Aesthetic assumptions and poetic styles have altered over the centuries, yet the great and often terrifying themes of time, change,age, and death are timeless. The poems here - by writers from Emily Dickinson, Wallace Stevens, and Edna St. Vincent Millay to Sharon Olds, Lucille Clifton, and W. S. Merwin - trace the trajectory of grief, but they also illustrate how the deepest sorrow has produced countless poignant and resonant works of art - words that can aid us as we struggle with our own farewells."--BOOK JACKET.
Publishers Weekly
Co-author of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the 19th-Century Literary Imagination and author of the recent Kissing the Bread: New and Selected Poems 1969-1999, Sandra M. Gilbert has here assembled Inventions of Farewell: A Collection of Elegies. She divides the poems among sections entitled "Watching: Visions of the Dying and the Dead," "`In the Chill of the Body': Viewing the Dead," "`How To Perform Funeral': Ceremonies of Separation" and "Grieving: Lamentation for the Dead," among others, and includes a section of "`Laments for the Makers': Poets Mourning Other Poets": Johnson on Shakespeare, Bishop on Lowell, Sexton on Plath, Hayden on Dunbar, Crane on Melville, and others. Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information.