‘Re-dressing’ Modern War Elegies: Heaney as an Example

This paper picks up at a moment when modern elegy is most sceptical regarding the act of consolation. It argues that, although the contemporary elegy maintains this long-standing modernist scepticism towards the conventional elegiac, the production of contemporary elegy is ironically less ironic and critical and is potentially more contributory to the genre in changing ethical contexts.

Social productions of space between a body and a voice are beginning to reclaim acts of elegy in a new ethics. This new ethics bends the form toward a more personal and private self-critique, which questions the authority of the spectator/elegist prominent in WWI poems, exemplified by Owen. That is to say, it is often the speaker and mourner, or the production of witness and spectacle, that is under attack, rather than the literary form itself. We have seen that Heaney’s act of elegy produces a new line of reserved and ambiguous grief on the mourner’s part, and unexpected responses from the objects of mourning. His poetry targets elegy’s commemorative function along the elegiac line of demarcation, more than its consolatory function, subtracting the speaker’s individual authority even more than the modern elegiac. His poems position themselves as a species of embarrassing elegiac act, well beyond the ironic attacks towards self-annihilating ‘singers’ such as we find in Owen’s elegies.