More Mood than Mode: Elegy’s Mixed Feelings

Writing about genre tends to require broad definitions and big claims. Without them, you can expect readers and interlocutors to ask, with barely veiled frustration, “But what makes this poem an elegy?” Especially if the poem is not about the death of a loved one. Or not about death at all. I get this question a lot.

And I should begin by confessing something. Writing about elegy in a scholarly mode feels strange to me. Strange because I probably will not finish the book on political elegy that I started over ten years ago (as my dissertation). Strange because leaving that project behind provokes its own kind of mourning. (I suppose writing from a place of ambivalence—if not despair—is appropriate to the matter at hand.)

In any case, I feel some distance from the writing that launched these ideas, and that distance required me to return to and synthesize some of the literature on English-language elegies. And so I reread. I synthesized. I wrote things like this in my notebook: “Somehow, I’d forgotten that classical elegies are basically just men challenging each other to singing competitions.” And I was reminded anew that elegy presents us with a problem. A definition problem.

Pick up nearly any history of the genre and you’ll discover a form that has been so variously defined over the centuries, it’s dizzying. Some definitions are predominantly formal (the elegiac distich or couplet, for example), some are tropological (see above, re: shepherds), and others seem to hinge upon more nebulous qualities like feeling and tone. It is by no means a given that elegies through the ages take as their topic the death of a loved one, mentor, or idol, though that has been a common thread in some of the most famous examples of the genre in English.

Peter Sacks’s The English Elegy: Studies in the Genre from Spenser to Yeats (1987) and Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney (1994)—both groundbreaking books in the field—offer models of mourning that are psychoanalytic, generally, and Freudian, specifically. It seems fair to say that Sigmund Freud’s 1917 essay “Mourning and Melancholia” is the sine qua non of English-language elegy studies. Central to Freud’s understanding of grief (in 1917, anyway) is the dichotomy between productive and pathological responses to loss. When we mourn successfully, we redirect our libidinal energies toward something other than the deceased loved one. In other words, some external object, person, or experience compensates for and ultimately replaces what is lost, calling us outside ourselves and our pain and into the world of the living. But when we’re mired in melancholia, this substitutive process sputters and halts. We might think of the difference between mourning and melancholia as the difference between healthy (if reluctant) externalization and obsessive internalization. A willingness to accept that the world still exists and that it might offer comfort versus a compulsion to keep some version of the lost thing squirreled away in the heart like a nut. If you’re reading a cluster about modern elegy, I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.

Sacks’s readings of English elegies from the Renaissance to the early twentieth century tend to hinge on what he calls a “substitutive turn”—the verbal somersaults and psychic exchanges by which emotions get projected outward and, in turn, the external (read: natural) world soothes and consoles.[1] Ramazani’s genre history begins where Sacks’s ends: With Thomas Hardy’s “Elegies for an Era” and Wilfred Owen’s WWI laments. With, in other words, the transition to a modernity defined by seismic geopolitical, technological, social, and economic shifts. What distinguishes these twentieth-century elegies from their predecessors, according to Ramazani, is their anti-elegiac resistance to mourning. They do not soothe. They do not console. They often resist closure.

This is admittedly an oversimplified account of these scholars’ intricate arguments, not to mention their close readings of poems, but it establishes some of the main lines of their reasoning. Each deploys Freud’s concepts as lenses and, read together, their books offer a compelling literary history of poetry’s responses to loss.

Since the publication of Sacks’s and Ramazani’s books, there have been other important contributions to the field of elegy studies, each of which has examined the genre through its own lens: national identity, gender and sexuality, race, and literary movements and styles (to name some though probably not all).[2] Despite these varied approaches, twenty-first century scholars of elegy are still engaging with the Freudian models that preceded them, whether in an admiring embrace or an Oedipal tussle. This is the nature of scholarship, of course. We are required to acknowledge and respond to what came before.

Yet I find myself wondering whether there is something else that prompts us to return to the same psychoanalytic well. Something besides our duty as responsible literary critics and historians. There are other ways of understanding grief. And maybe more importantly for my purposes, there are other ways of understanding poems. And so I wonder what an approach to the genre that owes less of a debt to Freud might look like. Is it possible to arrive inductively at a theory of elegy? In other words, can we allow poems to give their own accounts of genre coherence and rupture—their own theories of mourning, even—without recourse to psychological or theoretical lenses? And if, in the end, it feels fruitless or unnecessary or impossible to “move beyond” Freud, does shifting our attention to elegies that mourn ideas, places, institutions, species, etc. help us think in new ways about his paradigm?

I pose these questions in earnest—not as mere provocations. Though I’m afraid that in what follows, I don’t exactly answer them. Instead, I use them as the driving force behind some of my thinking in the hopes that it might prompt further thinking. And to the skeptics who’d say, “You’re overstating Freud’s importance in contemporary accounts of mourning,” I’d respond: “You might be right. But consider some recent examples (some of which are, indeed, thinking ‘in new ways about his paradigm’)”.

Timothy Morton’s 2016 Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence suggests that our collective response to the climate crisis “require[s] . . . abjection without cleansing, a melancholia without mourning”.[3] Though he cites Freud’s dichotomy, he also gets us beyond it, or rather inside it, by comparing mourning on a grand, ecological scale to what I’m tempted to call a set of emotional nesting dolls:

“Yet within the melancholia is an unconditional sadness. And within the sadness is beauty. And within the beauty is longing. And within the longing is a plasma field of joy. Laughter inside tragedy. Comedy, the possibility space of which tragedy is a rare form. Comedy, the genre of coexistence” (Morton, Dark Ecology, 119).

If Morton gets from melancholia to comedy via a nested series of competing, contradictory affects, Patricia Rae, in her introduction to Modernism and Mourning (2007), takes the mourning-melancholia binary and twists it, with help from Derrida, into a figure-eight, a feedback loop, a pretzel. In this configuration, “success fails” and “failure succeeds,” to quote Derrida’s knotty reformulation of Freudian melancholia, which centers on the idea of a “cryptic enclave” where “a sense of intimacy [fuses with] a very real sense of . . . finality” (17). Encysted inside us long enough, the lost past becomes a future.

Morton, Rae, and Derrida are interested in the social and political uses of tragicomic melancholy (in Morton’s case) and the “unsettled crypt” (in Derrida’s and Rae’s), and Jonathan Flatley shares their interest in psychoanalytical resistance reconfigured as productive political resistance (Rae, Modernism and Mourning, 19). But his account in Affective Mapping: Melancholia and the Politics of Modernism (2008) shatters the Derridean crypt. Aerosolizes it into an ashy mist: a dispersed, diffuse, melancholic mood. 

My approach to thinking about elegy in the case study that follows—poems by Jack Spicer, co-founder of the so-called Berkeley Renaissance of the 1940s and 1950s—is both more granular and more nebulous than some of the work that precedes it (work to which my own thinking owes a great debt). More granular because of my tendency to work inductively—to begin with the poems themselves, following their logic toward a sometimes-idiosyncratic understanding of what they tell us about grief. More nebulous because the poems I’m most interested in often register grief as something social and collective, something akin to Raymond Williams’s idea of a “structure of feeling,” Flatley’s Heideggerian mood, or, more recently, Sara Marcus’s concept of “political disappointment.” Poet John Hollander has said that elegies are “more mood than mode,” and I take his pithy definition seriously.

And so, rather than reading with an eye toward mourning and or melancholia, specifically, or looking for a set of elegiac tropes (though there are plenty to be found), I tend to focus on understanding and naming the mood of Spicer’s poems. By mood I mean the poems’ affective attitude toward friends and loved ones present and gone. I also mean their attitude toward political ideals and social configurations that often felt to Spicer perilously close to ending and, in some instances, not all that desirable in the first place.

In many ways, Spicer’s life was melancholy. Tragic. He died in 1965, at the age of 40, from acute liver failure (the result of years of alcoholism). He alienated friends with his cruel humor, his tendency to feel easily betrayed, and his cantankerous insistence upon often impossible standards. The gadfly persona that made him such a charismatic mentor to younger poets also made him a difficult man to sustain close, lasting relationships with. As Kevin Killian and Lewis Ellingham put it in their biography, “[t]here were two Jack Spicers”. [4] The utopian pacifist who valorized love and community, on the one hand. And on the other, the troublemaker who persistently severed bonds of love and friendship, foreclosing the very utopian possibilities he claimed to revere.

This mix of personality traits makes itself felt in many of Spicer’s elegies. I might even say that it’s this mixed quality that defines Spicer’s contributions to the genre. Mournful and angry. Satirical yet tender. Bitingly funny to mask real hurt. A dissident within several already marginalized communities (avant-garde poets, leftists, gay men), Spicer’s elegiac writing registers this multiply marginalized status. In his attempt to reckon with his poetic and political forebears, he reinvigorates elegy’s mixed feelings and embraces its ugly ones. He cajoles his contemporaries, admonishes friends for selling out or giving up, and ridicules the neo-Romanticism of Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. In doing so, he complicates any easy or reassuring understanding of elegy’s politics, and he looks ahead to a poetic future he would never know.

Spicer’s practice of composing poems in series—book-length suites of short, interconnected lyrics—makes it difficult to present portable, illustrative examples within the scope of a short essay. (It’s also a testament to his novel approach to elegy.) In the space that remains, then, I’ll focus on three of Spicer’s works: A standalone lyric (rare for Spicer after the 1940s) called “They Murdered You: An Elegy on the Death of Kenneth Rexroth,” written in 1956 but unpublished until 2008; a short poem called “For Hal,” excerpted from his longer series Admonitions (1957); and the last poem in his final series, “Ten Poems for Downbeat,” a kind of series-within-a-series that appears at the end of his Book of Magazine Verse (1965).

Spicer’s premature elegy for Kenneth Rexroth, written when the elder statesman of the San Francisco left-y tribe was still very much alive, captures—at its most extreme—Spicer’s brand of internecine contempt. Most obviously, it’s a parody of Rexroth’s elegy for Dylan Thomas, “Thou Shalt Not Kill,” published that same year. It also contains echoes of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl, as Peter Gizzi and Kevin Killian, the editors of the 2008 edition of Spicer’s Collected Poetry, point out in their notes. But the editors offer little else by way of context and, as a result, it’s easy enough for a twenty-first-century reader to miss the poem’s sting.

In typical Spicerian fashion, the poem is, in Steven Fama’s words, “a kick-him-when[-]he’s[-]down overtly sarcastic or, at turns, devastatingly wry put down of Rexroth.”[5] According to Fama and Rexroth’s biographer, the senior poet had recently suffered a very public breakdown, the result of his wife’s decision to leave him for another well-known poet. And thanks to the literary gossip mill, Spicer was, as Fama suggests, well-aware of Rexroth’s marital crisis. But I’m less interested in the personal nature of the attack. What fascinates me is Spicer’s decision to prematurely and cruelly elegize a literary mentor—someone in whose orbit and under whose sway Spicer, like many poets in the Bay at that time, wrote. The poem begins by subtly lampooning Rexroth’s machismo:

“I will never again climb a mountain, read St. Augustine or go to bed

with a woman

Without wishing that you were there, Kenneth Rexroth

Sharing my experience”.[6]

Part of the joke—and I am tempted to call it a joke, albeit a barbed, melancholic one—is the fact that Spicer was gay. He and Rexroth would never “[s]har[e] [the] experience” of same-sex desire or the social marginalization that came with it during this period. But the joke gets more complicated as the poem continues:

“When you died last month at the age of 52 of stomach ulcers

It was as if we young men had lost the last hope of a libertarian

      revolution

A society where poetry, jazz, sex, politics and religion could function

      together like a giant gong

Each of whose tones perfectly overlays the other.

A society where Bohemians wouldn’t starve and predatory men

      wouldn’t lynch Negros and kill Jews and Hungarians

A society where wars would be abolished

A society where men and women would be perfectly free to do, say,

      think, feel what they wanted

Under your leadership.” (Spicer, “They Murdered You,” 64)

Spicer’s anaphora (“A society where…”; “You were there, Kenneth Rexroth…”) mirrors Rexroth’s in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” and Ginsberg’s in Howl. And to simultaneously parrot and mock both Rexroth and Ginsberg in one fell swoop is to acknowledge a tradition of overtly political, occasionally sappy, overly idealistic poetry and to distance himself from it. It is also to reimagine the kinds of affects and comportments elegies can accommodate.

If “Comedy [is] the genre of coexistence,” as Timothy Morton suggests, where might satire fit into this scheme (Morton 119)? And what about a satire as pointed as Spicer’s, which seems more interested in condemning than in coexisting, in critique rather than consensus. The answer, for Spicer anyway, is that you can’t have coexistence without disagreement and tension. And contending with disagreement and tension produces feelings—grief, disappointment, despair, loneliness—that fit quite easily within the silhouette of (even traditional) elegiac verse.

“They Murdered You” went unpublished during Spicer’s lifetime, perhaps unsurprisingly. But the tone of the poem, softened somewhat, carries into his book Admonitions, published a year after he wrote the Rexroth elegy, in 1957. “For Hal,” in particular, encapsulates Spicer’s embattled and elegiac stance toward sociability:

“For Hal

Youth

Is no excuse for such things

Responsibilities

Weigh like strawberries

On a shortcake.

Go

To the root of the matter

Get laid

Have a friend

Do anything

But be a free fucking agent.

No one

Has lots of them

Lays or friends or anything

That can make a little light in all that darkness.

There is a cigarette you can hold for a minute

In your weak mouth

And then the light goes out,

Rival, honey, friend,

And then you stub it out” (Spicer, “For Hal”, 167).

Written for a young initiate of the kind that formed the small circle around Spicer during this period, the poet links mortality to poetic ephemerality (poem as lit cigarette), and both of those things to coterie (having a few friends or lays), as well as to something like political autonomy (“free fucking agent”). The poem’s depiction of the affective vectors between and among individuals—the complicated emotions that can strain and warp any sense of connection or solidarity—crystallizes in its penultimate line, in which the “Hal” of the title is addressed as, simultaneously, “[r]ival, honey, [and] friend”. This set of terms of endearment, in which agonism sits comfortably next to sexual desire and platonic affection, suggests that the version of sociability that Spicer gives us in his poems is, often, a contradictory one. That Spicer leaves ambiguous the rhetorical pivot of this admonition (“Do anything / But be a free fucking agent”) is telling. Here, poetic form, in the form of line breaks, and tone are mutually constitutive and interdependent. Breaking the line as he does, after “Do anything,” enforces a pause that acts like a comma, making the meaning of the lines something like: “Do anything so long as you are, or act as, a free fucking agent.” However, the fact that there is no actual comma allows for an alternative gloss of the lines as: “Do anything except be a free fucking agent”—only connect.

And yet, time and again Spicer sabotages the very connections that drive so much of his poetic practice. Love turns to grief turns to grievance. It almost seems the opposite of Morton’s hopeful “plasma field of joy” at the core of our collective “longing” (Morton 119). Almost. If it weren’t for Spicer’s singular ability to transmute grief and grievance into poems both tender and lapidary. Vulnerable and cruel. That must be the “diamond” he’s always talking about—ugly, mucky emotions hyper-pressurized until they shine:

“So the heart breaks

Into small shadows

Almost so random

They are meaningless

Like a diamond

Has at the center of it a diamond

Or a rock

Rock” (Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me, 190).

Though Spicer could not have foreseen the cohesion of disparate student movements into what has become known as the New Left, the last serial poem in his corpus (“Ten Poems for Downbeat”) is oddly prescient in its evocation of Allen Ginsberg’s brand of poetry and of protest, both of which would become important touchstones in the youth movements of the late 1960s. The final poem in the series alludes to Ginsberg’s 1965 May Day visit to Prague, and captures what scholar Daniel Katz has called Spicer’s “oxymoronic conceptualization of communal political agency”—a vision of collectivity shot through with anger, resentment, sadness, and scorn[7]:

“At least we both know how shitty the world is. You wearing a

beard as a mask to disguise it. I wearing my tired smile. I

don’t see how you do it” (Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me, 426).

This is not an elegy in any traditional sense, but its mood feels undeniably melancholic. The wry scorn of some of his earlier elegies is still there, too, especially in the glee Spicer seems to take in that violent counterfactual (“If they’d attacked…” [426]). But it’s tempered by moments of connection: the sense of resignation Spicer imagines Ginsberg shares with him, despite his outward displays of exuberance; the insistence on love, even if it’s bound up with spite and malice; and those last three heartbreaking lines, in which the word “combine” takes on an evocative double meaning. On the one hand, it calls to mind automation and, in turn, suggests we are controlled by the machinery of our emotions so, why bother fighting them? But the lines’ ambiguity allows for a less fatalistic reading, one that interprets “combine” as “combination” or “mixture.” Thus, the “combine of your heart and my heart” suggests something is shared between two apparent antagonists—one marching with thousands of students in tow, the other toiling in self-imposed obscurity (426). What Spicer rejects, it seems, is not community itself but the equation of collective life with unity, consensus, and the erasure of difference.

There’s a story to be told about the queer afterlives of Spicer’s elegies. A story I don’t have space for here but that might include Lee Edelman’s theorizing on queer pessimism, the writing and art of David Wojnarowicz, the poetry of Tim Dlugos and Thom Gunn and Kevin Killian. It might even include this especially moving—precisely because of its mixed emotions—AIDS Memorial Quilt panel, made in honor of Terry Sutton, a member of the activist group ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), by fellow members and friends:

ACT UP was famously critical of what its members perceived as the Quilt’s quietism and the project’s leaders’ unwillingness to take a more confrontational, politically partisan stand on the AIDS crisis. The Sutton panel captures ACT UP’s stridency: It resists sentimentalism. It exists in tension with, and even angrily rejects, the larger whole to which it’s sutured. And yet, it is part of that whole nonetheless. And its presence there feels less like a resentful capitulation (though it is possible to read it that way) than like a tender if reluctant accommodation. The outsider’s angry militance is still present, reinforced by the rough, dashed-off quality of the spray-painted letters. But its co-existence alongside other panels within a larger quilt block softens its sting.[8] Hard and soft. Angry yet tender. Militant but yielding. Funny, even. There’s something sweetly cartoonish about the graphics, and I can imagine Sutton’s friends laughing through tears as they spray-painted that small, crooked heart.

Angry, playful, mournful, paradoxical. These are the qualities of Spicer’s poems and of Spicer the man, too. Spicer the misanthropic humanist, who hated what was and loved what was lost or disappearing. Spicer the beloved if ornery mentor. He wrote with skepticism, even pessimism, about social progress achieved through direct, collective action. He wrote with an eye toward accelerating ecological damage. He wrote with a sense of our shared future in view—a future he would not be part of. “Death is not final,” he reassures us, “Only parking lots” (Spicer, My Vocabulary Did This to Me, 377).