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American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman.

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American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. By Max Cavitch. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. 336 pages. $67.50 hardcover; $22.50 paper.

Elegy, engaging with the fundamental human conditions of mortality, loss, and love, is among the oldest of poetic genres. As Max Cavitch notes in his well-researched American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman, American elegy "has an unbroken history in English-speaking North America from the earliest years of British settlement" (2). Until now, no comprehensive treatment has been devoted to this genre beyond the Puritan period, and not enough critical or theoretical attention has been given to the transformation and reinvention of the genre. Cavitch's book provides a timely, valuable contribution to literary scholarship as well as to cultural studies, especially in the context of national and individual ways of mourning in the United States since 9/11.

American Elegy begins with eighteenth-century New England Puritans' revision of the English legacy of the funeral elegy. Cavitch shows that "Until the eighteenth century, the history of American elegy was...

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