The decline of the elegy betokens a certain loss of sensibility in the western world in the twentieth century, a loss described by Mircea Eliade as "desacralization". Where other cultures continue to distinguish between the sacred and the profane, the West has conflated the two.

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ADONIS... 

One of the most important developments in poetry – and one that has scarcely been noticed – is the death of the elegy. Pick up The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry and you'll find no elegies. There is William Carlos Williams' 'An Elegy for D.H Lawrence'. But it is about Lawrence, the public figure, not Lawrence the friend and intimate. And there is even a note of complaint, for the poet had apparently written Lawrence a letter which the latter had never answered! "...Once he received a letter –/ he never answered it –/ praising him...."  

The other titles under 'Elegy' include: 'Elegy for a Cricket', 'Elegy for a Puritan Conscience', and 'Elegy on the Dust'. I think the reader can surmise the lowly status enjoyed by the elegy in these modern times from these titles.   

This is not to say that the elegy was always written for people the author had intimately known. The greatest elegy in the English language, Milton's 'Lycidas', was written subsequent to the death of his former fellow collegian, Edward King, in a shipwreck. What Milton felt was what most of us feel in the face of death – especially premature death. "For Lycidas is dead, dead ere his prime...." and "He must not float upon his watery bier/ Unwept, and welter to the parching wind, / Without the meed of some melodious tear."   

The premature death of John Keats – partly due to tuberculosis, partly to the savage criticism meted out to his poem 'Endymion'  – provoked the greatest lament of the Romantic period, Shelley's 'Adonais'. It begins clearly as a lament: 'I weep for Adonais, he is dead!/ O weep for Adonais!'.   

One notices the rawness of the emotion described here – faithfully recalling the original inspiration of Bion, in his "Lament for Adonis", reaching across two thousand years: "Woe, woe for Adonis, he hath perished, the beauteous Adonis, dead is the beauteous Adonis, the Loves join in the lament.  No more in thy purple raiment, Cypris, do thou sleep; arise, thou wretched one, sable-stoled, and beat thy breasts, and say to all, 'He hath perished, the lovely Adonis!' 

Woe, woe for Adonis, the Loves join in the lament!"  

I can imagine what a teacher at a creative writing course would say to a pupil who turned in a poem beginning with the above lines. She would say: "Not bad, but it needs to be toned down; the 'Woe, woe for Adonis' especially tells more than it shows. Understatement, my boy, understatement!" The modern mantra in poetry is 'Show, don't tell'. The idea is that the poem itself should not contain any emotion, but should provide enough information for the reader to be able to deduce, so to speak, his emotions from the information. The poem must show, not tell! It's a bit like reading a police report of a murder, in which all the emotional details have been stripped clean.   

Here are the exact words of a teacher of creative writing at a 'creative writing workshop'.   

"Torn from an old magazine

this richly coloured advertisement

'The timelessness of diamonds'.  

Comment: it would be stronger without the second line (which "tells" more than it "shows"). 

Torn from an old magazine

'The timelessness of diamonds'."   

If the dictum "Show, don't tell" had been applied to the whole of English  (and Greek, or indeed, any) literature from the earliest days, we would not have had such priceless gems as "Lycidas", "Adonais" or Byron's elegies for Thyrza. The "Elegy for D.H Lawrence" by Williams is shot through with this technique: one can scarcely tell whether it's a dissertation on the work of Lawrence or a regret that the fellow's gone. The only indicator is the toned-down "Poor Lawrence" repeated three times! Even that would be shot down by a creative writing teacher today. (This largely explains the dissidence and dissonance of popular art: "She loves me, yea, yea, yea"..."Hey, teacher, leave 'em kids alone".)  

Byron's elegies tell, they don't show. They scream their emotions from the rooftops! 

"O snatch'd away in beauty's bloom!

On thee shall press no ponderous tomb;

But on thy turf shall roses rear

Their leaves, the earliest of the year,

And the wild cypress wave in tender gloom...."  

And, of course, there is the masterpiece of English poetic music, Tennyson's "In Memoriam".  

"Dark house, by which once more I stand

Here in the long unlovely street,

Doors, where my heart was used to beat

So quickly, waiting for a hand...."                         

In these lines, we can feel the anguish of the poet at the death of his very intimate friend, Arthur Hallam. How many of us would not write poetry like this for those we have loved and are no more, if only we had the talent to match our grief?  

And anyone in Bangladesh who visits a graveyard will easily understand what Thomas Gray meant when he wrote his "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". In the western world, a churchyard was once capable of inspiring deep contemplation on the mutability of earthly things, the value of human affection that must ultimately be frustrated by the grave. And which, nevertheless, lasts beyond the grave. 

"On some fond breast the parting soul relies,

Some pious drops the closing eye requires;

E'en from the tomb the voice of Nature cries,

E'en in our ashes live their wonted fires."   

...DESACRALIZED 

What is the reason behind the death of the elegy? I personally think that the answer to the question would also answer another query: why did poetry in the last century die? Now, consider the subject matter of the elegy. It is death. And what transformation had the perception of death undergone in the twentieth century? Max Weber had early on predicted that death in a capitalist society would become meaningless. This would be the automatic byproduct of rationalization and the 'disenchantment of the world'. Sociologists refer to this process as 'desacralization'. In a society that so devalues the permanent and stresses the ephemeral, death – the most permanent of human affairs – must seem a mere inconvenience. The process of rationalization is clearly seen in poetry. Anyone who has read any amount of modern poetry will have been impressed by its highly self-conscious polish and perfection. It is like much of modern technology – soulless, technical mastery (and forged in "poetry workshops" to boot!). 

"More than the 'human dignity' exalted by the humanists, it is the individual liberty to reject every authority outside of God that has made possible – by a slow process of desacralization – the 'modern world' such as it emerges in the period of the Enlightenment, and defines itself with the French Revolution and the triumph of science and technology." So observed Mircea Eliade when discussing Martin Luther in his classic A History of Religious Ideas. In his introduction he refers to "...the sole, but important, religious creation of the modern Western world. I refer to the ultimate stage of desacralization. The process is of considerable interest to the historian of religions; for it illustrates the complete camouflage of the 'sacred' – more precisely, its identification with the 'profane'."  

A paragraph on death in the western world occurs, at first sight rather oddly, in a discussion of Tibetan religion: "The Bardo Thodol is certainly the best-known Tibetan religious text in the Western world. Translated and published in English in 1928, it has become, especially since 1960, a sort of bedside reading for numerous young people.... The interest it arouses, not only among the psychologists, historians, and artists, but above all among the young, is symptomatic: it indicates both the almost total desacralization of death in contemporary Western societies, and the restless inquiry and exasperated desire which seek to revalorize – religiously or philosophically – the act which terminates human existence".  

Eliade's observations explain the nature of the modern elegy, especially as written by the celebrated Sylvia Plath. In her poem "Daddy", she says 

"I was ten when they buried you.

At twenty I tried to die

And get back, back, back to you.

I thought even the bones would do." 

Does that mean that she loved daddy to death? Au contraire.  

"There's a stake in your fat black heart

And the villagers never liked you.

They are dancing and stamping on you.

They always knew it was you.

Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I'm through." 

Authors Website: http://iftekharsayeed.weebly.com

Authors Bio:
Iftekhar Sayeed teaches English and economics. He was born and lives in Dhaka, ‎Bangladesh. He has contributed to AXIS OF LOGIC, ENTER TEXT, POSTCOLONIAL ‎TEXT, LEFT CURVE, MOBIUS, ERBACCE, THE JOURNAL, and other publications. ‎He is also a freelance journalist. He and his wife love to tour Bangladesh. ‎