ABSTRACT
In Sleepless Souls: Suicide in Early Modern England, Michael MacDonald and Alexander Murphy argue that the sentimentalization of death in the eighteenth century fostered a certain degree of sympathy for suicide, reaching its “zenith” with the death of Thomas Chatterton in 1771. Traditional English elegy is both the poetry of death and the poetry of mourning. Conventional readings describe elegy as an attempt to complete the process of mourning, with the poem culminating in an acceptance of the beloved’s death and a revelation of the poet’s particular poetic power. Male friendship is the standard focus of the English elegiac tradition, which is contoured in this sense around the homosocial. As such, women are typically neither mourner nor mourned in the public spaces of elegiac discourse, especially in the pastoral tradition. Indeed, the lines are contoured by absence, as “no friend” and “no kind domestic tear” mourn the loss of the unnamed woman.
