ABSTRACT
Jewish poetics has always been deeply responsive to inherited tradition especially where tradition is defined in the matrix of cultural and transnational interactions. This is particularly the case with elegiac poetry, in which the binding of the generations joins with the immediate needs of commemoration to form part of the palimpsest of culture. Elegy in both the British and American traditions has become a site of tension over the conflicting demands of self-interest aesthetic mastery, and memorializing the dead. The contemporary inflection of such anxiety as it has come down to us finds a singular watershed in Romanticism. This chapter argues that Anglo-Jewish poets of the nineteenth century take up the challenges of elegy by turning its vexations back upon itself and upon its mainstream readers; that is, they address their poems to the very anxieties generated by elegy and worry the assumptions about its ethical culpability.
