Form
5 poems
Tennyson spent seventeen years mourning his friend Arthur Hallam, and the result is the greatest elegy in English. These selected cantos trace its journey — from the desolate empty house, through “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” to a faith made, as Eliot said, of doubt.
The Victorian poet and critic behind “Dover Beach”: a life spent bridging faith and doubt, Romantic feeling and classical restraint, poetry and the criticism that made him the “sage” of his age.
The same gesture carries two meanings: shouldered in victory, shouldered to the grave. Housman’s elegy makes a case for early death it doesn’t quite trust.
It’s the poem everyone knows by Whitman and the one he came to resent: a rhymed, sentimental elegy for the assassinated Lincoln from the man who invented American free verse. Here’s why it works, and what it cost him.
Whitman’s Lincoln elegy braids lilac, star, and thrush into a ritual of grief and renewal in free verse.