David Baker: The Figure of Grief (January 2004)

Elegy, David Baker suggests, typically contains two figures—the grieving poet or speaker, and the beloved departed. What happens, then, when an elegy makes use of a kind of triangulation in which death too is figured, even praised? Baker examines how Walt Whitman’s “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomed” and Emily Dickinson’s “Because I could not stop for Death” convey a kind of embrace of death, and, in doing so, transform and eroticize the elegiac form.