The Poetry of Loss

Judith Harris, Ph.D., is the author of three books of poetry (LSU) and a critical book Signifying Pain: Constructing and Healing the Self through Writing (SUNY Series in Psychoanalysis and Culture). She currently conducts seminars on poetry writing and psychoanalytic theory at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. She is associate editor of Clio’s Psyche: the Psychohistory Forum and has held academic positions in the English and Creative Writing Departments of George Washington University, American University, and Catholic University. She was awarded poetry residencies at Yaddo and Frost Place. Her poetry has appeared nationwide in The Atlantic, Slate, The Nation, The New Republic, The New York Times blog, The Hudson Review and the syndicated newspaper column, ‘‘American Life in Poetry.’’ Her essays have appeared in Division Review: A Quarterly Psychoanalytic Forum; The Chronicle; Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society; and The Canadian Journal of Psychoanalysis, and The British Journal of Guidance and Counselling. She was formerly affiliated with George Washington University, Catholic University, and American University. She has presented her work at the Library of Congress, Folger Shakespeare Library, and the American Psychoanalytic Association.

Introduction: The Elegiac Language and Expression of Grief

CHAPTER ONE: Psychoanalytic Theories of Mourning and the Failure to Mourn

CHAPTER TWO: The Lost Child in Wordsworth’s Elegies and John Bowlby’s Attachment and Loss

CHAPTER THREE: Loss and Beauty: Keats’s Women and the "Ode to Psyche"

CHAPTER FOUR: A Consolation of Beauty, Grief, and Sadness in Jane Kenyon’s Poems

CHAPTER FIVE: Sylvia Plath’s Mock and Self-Elegies: A Kleinian Reading of "Edge"

CHAPTER SIX: A Father’s Grief: Elegy and Counter-Tradition in Edward Hirsch’s Gabriel

CHAPTER SEVEN: An Inheritance of Terror: Postmemory and Intergenerational Transmission of Trauma in Second-Generation Jews after the Holocaust

CHAPTER EIGHT: The Canticles of Grief: Contemporary Elegies and the Limits of Mourning

CHAPTER NINE: The Literature of Loss: Elegies as a Therapeutic Strategy for Coping with Grief

Conclusion