The Healing of Goodbye: The Poetry of Loss

Review of Judith Harris’s The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies (New York: Routledge, 2023), ISBN 978-1032009490, 180, hardbound, $160.

Psychoanalysis, from its inception, used literature as its pri-

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mary signifier.  As Freud described, “Even if we wish to deny the common man of his religion, we do not have the authority of the poet.” For Freud, poets have an uncanny authority to connect with and articulate subtle insights that could illuminate the nature of the human experience for the common person. The human experience, in this instance, is “facing the death of a loved one,” which stands at the center of Judith Harris’s remarkable new book, The Poetry of Loss: Romantic and Contemporary Elegies.

Harris offers a “deep read” over an interesting selection of poetic writers (some familiar to me, some not), tracing both the psychological, social, and historical evolution of elegy from the Romantic era (circa 1800) to the present while seamlessly exploring the development of psychoanalytic thought related to the process of mourning.  Freud’s seminal 1917 paper, “Mourning and Melancholia,” establishes the theoretical touchpoint throughout this volume, and Harris offers one of the best renderings of Freud’s metapsychology I have read in recent times.  Further, moving beyond Freud, the author sheds light on a number of other theorists such as Sacks, Volkan, Clewell, Derrida, Barthes, and the well-known psychoanalytic theorists, Lacan, Bowlby, and Klein, deepening the discussion on the nature of loss and if there really is a such thing as closure or consolation after mourning.

Harris readily keeps an eye on contemporary theories of grieving, arguing for a less “binary” (healthy/unhealthy) approach to understanding the subtle vicissitudes of the grieving process. She also offers commentary on how elegy reflects a kind of barometer of cultural attitudes reflecting the ever-changing social norms surrounding death and mourning. The author compares the Romantic era with its ornate linguistic flourishes and lamentations, expressing a wish to sustain a sense of communion with the lost object, unlike the Modern post-industrial, post-Holocaust age where skepticism and breaking with common rituals appear more in the service of breaking bonds with the past.

Instead, she explicates poets who display a confessional, idiosyncratic, anti-consolatory response to personal loss. Mid-century poets like Sylvia Plath, whose work is discussed, are given to anti-consolatory poetry that reopens the psychological wound caused by the faulty parenting of the deceased. Unlike earlier times, in this new world order, grief is less part of the natural order but rather seen as something in the way of living, something “to get over.”

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Once Harris establishes the psychoanalytic foundational principles, she begins with a dynamic understanding of Wordsworth and Keats’s poetic elegies, demonstrating how they embody the poets’ personal struggle in the face of loss.  The author sees the Romantic era as a departure from the traditions of orthodox Christian religiosity that so dominated elegiac literature, freeing the poet to explore their personal experiences and meditations as they connect with the cycle of life and nature.

Then the book pivots to the post-Holocaust modern age where elegiac poetry is utilized more as an ongoing confrontation with history and remembrance of loss, alongside the poet’s ambivalence, pain, and self-disclosure, often lacking resolution and consolation.  This is best seen in the modern poet Jane Kenyon and her struggles with loss and depression, linking to the struggle between “dark and light” of her elegiac poems “What Came to Me” and “Sick at Simmer’s End.”  As Harris comments, “her depression ironically serves a psychic source for artistic inspiration” (p. 78). This, of course, also relates to Harris’s next chapter on Plath and her final poem “Edge.” The poem suggests Plath’s well-chronicled inability to come to terms with her profound love/hate relationship with her father, “I cannot ignore the murderous self; it is there, I smell it and feel it” (p. 83), the aggression turned against the self as Klein would interpret may have been suspected in Plath’s suicide.  Harris then moves to the tragically inconsolable journey of the loss of a child in the chapter, “A Father’s Grief,” about the poet Edward Hirsch and the death of his son chronicled in the book-length poem Gabriel: A Poem (2014).  As Harris writes, “Death, of course, leaves not only a hole or a void but presents an uncompromising barrier to the lost son, the loss itself is inflexible, unbending, and unalterable” (p. 107).

Harris notes the movement from traditional elegy that speaks of the sorrow, as well as the idealization, of grief itself now that modern society has broken with conventional religion and social norms. The death rituals that used to structure grief in abstract terms are no longer sustainable in an increasingly atheistic world. Poets in the modernist and contemporary age are, in Harris’s view, steeped in “paradox” and “ambiguity.” Elegy becomes a self-reflective catharsis confronting the anguish of the loss, often without the aim of consoling.

The final chapters present the author making a case that elegy may represent an important but fading literary tradition that can

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prove instrumental in the therapeutic dyad, enabling the individual to cope with both personal and collective tragedy. The author uses her own autobiographical writings, interrupting her own critical discourse with first-person memoir, to drive home to readers that intergenerational trauma is a phenomenon to contend with. She reveals her struggle as a second-generation daughter of parents who, as children, survived the Holocaust. Then Harris points to the healing element of elegiac writing that gives continuing voice to sorrow, providing a “therapeutic strategy” when confronted with grief, something she implements in her community workshops with adult poets.

Overall, Harris demonstrates how the early elegiac poets used their writings to come to terms with death through an “aesthetic engagement with language” (p. 1), which is becoming a lost art.  The case for the act of writing poetic elegy as facilitating healing technique is still in question, although a strong case is made.  Nearly all the poets she described suffered a great deal despite their incredible gifts to express themselves on the page.  For certain the communal sharing of pain and grief, through writing, although not quite a working through, is indeed a proactive response, and potentially a medium to facilitate the process of successful mourning when facing the trauma of loss.

Embedded in all grieving is a goodbye.  The willingness to say goodbye or, in psychoanalytic terms, the resistance to saying goodbye lies at the heart of Harris’s poetic explorations. Harris’s poets live in a constant tormented dance between holding the memory of the lost object and betraying the memory of the lost one and finding a substitute—which was Freud’s concept of “healthy mourning.”  The goodbye can come in many forms, both healthy and unhealthy, as a result of the complexity of the original object relationship that existed before the loss.

In this well-constructed volume, Harris suggests that both reading and writing elegies can facilitate the grieving process, providing a medium for rendering a healthy goodbye. Although the book is loaded with intriguing and evocative interpretations and analysis, the question as to whether the elegy, from past to present, could be seen as equal to or similar to the content of a manifest dream, or for that matter, a kind of free association, or both, is still in question.  Harris writes, “I was eager to see if the clinical research on mourning would help [in] understanding the relationship between grief, art and literary expression of both the finite and

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ephemeral in a variety of canonical and non-canonical elegies” (p. 158). To this extent, the author brilliantly succeeds in this heartfelt and scholarly endeavor.

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