The death of a child is, for many, a fear too terrifying to imagine. The poems collected here explore this difficult loss; they examine the realities that form, and fall away, after the realization of a parent?s worst fear. Through the poems? speaker, a bereaved mother, a multitude of worlds are mapped: the world of grief, of language, of the body, of love and guilt, of conflicted self-identity, of cultural denial, of courageous reclamation. What emerges from these poems is an intimate and layered lyric narrative that negotiates the collapsed boundaries of the public and the private, the dead and the living. / Graduation date: 2009 / Access restricted to the OSU Community at author's request from April 17, 2012 - April 17, 2017

Propertius 3.20 is a poem that has received relatively little critical attention for its merits as a poem or its relationship to the poets larger poetic project and to the turbulent era in which it was written. Here, the poem is placed into its literary and cultural context and subjected to a gendered reading influenced by modern feminist theory. Propertius 3.20 uses the language of fidelity and contracts that was traditionally associated with solemn legal ceremonies and agreements in his depiction of a socially illegitimate relationship between a lover and his mistress. The destabilization of relationships caused by the application of this language to the demimonde leads to a problematization of the gender roles of the actors in the relationships. Propertius 3.20 raises issues relevant to the construction of gender in the Propertian corpus and the crisis of masculinity triggered by the rise of Augustus.

Propertius 3.20 is a poem that has received relatively little critical attention for its merits as a poem or its relationship to the poets larger poetic project and to the turbulent era in which it was written. Here, the poem is placed into its literary and cultural context and subjected to a gendered reading influenced by modern feminist theory. Propertius 3.20 uses the language of fidelity and contracts that was traditionally associated with solemn legal ceremonies and agreements in his depiction of a socially illegitimate relationship between a lover and his mistress. The destabilization of relationships caused by the application of this language to the demimonde leads to a problematization of the gender roles of the actors in the relationships. Propertius 3.20 raises issues relevant to the construction of gender in the Propertian corpus and the crisis of masculinity triggered by the rise of Augustus.

In my dissertation, "Writing with an Iron Pen: Gender and Genre in Early American Elegy," I show how the work of early American women poets engages the same generic questions about the process and use of consolation as modern anti-elegies. The first half of the dissertation focuses on poems written by one of America's earliest poets. In chapters one and two I look to the elegies of Anne Bradstreet to show how, from the first book of poems published by an American colonist, women poets have highlighted the limits of the consolatory elegy when either elegist or elegized was not a valued male member of the community. In chapters three and four, I turn to the Age of Revolutions and eighteenth-century poets Hannah Griffitts and Phillis Wheatley. Their elegies, I argue, extend and expand grief even as they refuse the sympathetic identifications that, in contemporary poems, offer opportunities for demonstrations of sympathy key to the earliest formations of American national identity. Ultimately, I suggest, early American women's poetry offers another location from which to contest the problems of affect, power, identity, and community posed by the conventional elegy. / text

The Ovidian Ariadne of Heroides 10 self-consciously constructs her persona into the archetype of erotic abandonment. The heroine attempts to re-write her destiny and reverse the loss of Theseus and her unfulfilled desire. But Ariadne cannot change her depiction as abandoned by Theseus. The language employed in her epistle only succeeds in emphasising the erotic loss. The more Ariadne tries to change the master narrative, the more she accentuates the literary echoes of her abandonment. This thesis argues that the intertextual echoes of the heroine should not exclusively be read from Catullus 64, but that Ovid‟s Ariadne writes her epistle in the context of many genres - elegy, epic, tragedy, exilic elegy - which all emphasise loss, death, and erotic disillusionment. My reading of Heroides 10 avoids the interpretations of parody previously read of this particular heroine to argue instead the way Ariadne constructs the governing persona in accordance with the genres of both elegy and epistolography. Ariadne‟s self-representation as an elegiac puella ultimately reflects her traditional literary and artistic image. / This disrupts her self-depiction as an erotic object and subsequently her construction of masculine desire. The heroine‟s epistolary gaze and voice self-consciously re-affirm her position as the quintessential abandoned woman, while her poetics continually assert the irreversible end of her relationship and the failure of her words to change her fate. Death is the primary concern of the epistle, in which the request for proper burial replaces the desire for erotic union. Memorialisation and writing become the prime motivation for Ariadne‟s poetics whereby she attempts to reverse Theseus‟ forgetful mind with a concrete monument to the self. The dislocation of Ariadne‟s erotics alongside the failure of epistolarity attests to the failure of her voice in constructing change to her traditional narrative.

"Heyday" is a collection of twenty-seven poems and one sonnet cycle.

This dissertation is a collection of poems preceded by a critical preface. The preface considers the major changes within the elegy from the traditional English elegy—the touchstone poems for this genre being Milton's "Lycidas," Shelley's "Adonais," and Tennyson's "In Memoriam"—to the contemporary elegy and argues that many of these changes showcase contemporary elegists' active refusal and reversal of the time-honored traditions of the form. The preface is divided into an introduction and three sections, each of which recognizes and explores one significant alteration—or reversal—to the conventions of the form as established by early English elegists. The first discusses the traditional elegiac tradition of consolation in which the speaker, after displaying a series of emotions in reaction to the death of a loved one, ultimately finds comfort in the knowledge that the deceased lives eternally in heaven. This convention is contrasted with a common contemporary rhetorical movement in which the speaker not only lacks comfort by the end of the poem, but often refuses any kind of consolation, preferring instead to continue his grief. The second recognizes and explores the traditional elegiac tradition in which the speaker, listing the virtues of the beloved, replaces the real, historical person with a symbol which represents what society has lost due to this death. This convention is contrasted against a common contemporary theme in which the speaker, in an attempt to evoke authenticity, portrays the deceased subject not as a romanticized symbol, but as a real human being. The final section discusses the definition of the traditional elegy as a reaction to the literal death of a loved one and contrasts this with the more fluid contemporary understanding of the elegy as a poem about loss—either a literal or metaphorical death—and a poem which need not display conventional aspects of mourning but rather a wide variety of responses to the problem of loss.

This collection of original poetry is preceded by a critical introduction that includes an exploration of Sylvia Plath’s elegiac poems, particularly her failed attempts to respond to grief. Similarly, the following poems deal with failed attempts to assuage suffering and how one can address his or her need to be loved when that need is unmet. The essay follows Plath’s use of the traditional elegy to create her own elegiac poems about her dead father, using strategies such as mythologizing the dead or wishing to join the dead. Her strategy evolves into an exorcism of grief in her emotionally heavy poems, such as “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus,” and later into an exploration into her speakers’ abject consciousness. The essay introduces my own poetry with its discussion of work that unapologetically confronts many forms of adversity, of inevitable anguish that follows, and of ways to respond.

The elegies, as a major body of John Donne's poetry, have been unjustly slighted by critics. In order to correct this imbalance in Donne criticism, this study will examine the whole body of Donne's formal elegies. Despite their diversity, it will be shown that they fall into several broad groupings based on tonal quality and elegiac type: complaintive, lamentive, amatory, and abusive and satiric. By examining Donne's elegies individually and in light of both the Elizabethan and the classical elegy, it will be seen that Donne is the only English poet who utilizes the full scope allowed by the classical elegy.

This thesis begins by outlining the origins of the elegy as a literary form, passing from the fragmentary remains of the Greek elegy, and of Roman love—poets before Catullus, to a brief discussion of the poetry of Catullus, Propertius and the elegists of the <u>Corpus Tibullianum</u>, indicating in each case the main differences between the literary attitudes of these posts and those of Ovid. A detailed analysis is made of the Ovidian erotic code, as contained in the <u>Amores</u>, the <u>Ars</u> and the <u>Remedia</u>, and other of the <u>Amatoria</u> such as the <u>Heroides</u> and the pseudo-Ovidiun <u>Pulex</u>, demonstrating inter-relationships between these works, and also any correspondences to particular components of Ovid's code in the works of earlier Greek and Roman love-poets. Some attempt is next made to show to what sitent Ovid's themes and mannerisms were adopted by continental poets of the sixteenth century. Neo-Latin poetry is first dealt with, as represented by Joannes Secundus, Beza, Bonnefonius and the writers included in the <u>Carmina Illustrium Poetarum Italorum</u>, 1576, the <u>Delitiae CC. Italorum Poetarum</u>, 1608, the <u>Delitiae c. Poetarum Gallorum</u>, 1609, and the <u>Delitiae Poeterum Bel icorum</u>, 1614. Vernacular writers discussed in this context include Alamanni, Ariosto, Bembo, Berni, Boiardo, della Casa, Chiabrera, Guarini, Marino, Mauro, Poliziano, Serafino, Tasso and Varchi in Italy and de Balf, du Bellsy, Belleau, Marat, Ronsard and Théophile in France.