ABSTRACT
Foucault’s genealogy is well known, but people would like to ask what the impersonal worldview it describes might mean for poetic elegy. Across the history of twentieth- and twenty-first-century English-language verse, there has been a shift away from the traditional or religious demands of ancestry – the passing-on from one recognizable human likeness to another – toward something more violent and discontinuous. Embedded within the most radical re-poeticizations of modernity is resistance to the scopophilia and apparent omniscience of the medical gaze. The modern hospital is not simply the place where the individual body is received; rather, it establishes how and for how long it goes on dying, as well as when and according to what assistive technologies it is declared dead. Though Yeats’s poem is usually situated within the context of the Irish Revival and the poet’s historical denunciations of middle-class philistinism, it can also be read for its inscription of institutional modernity.
