Wit Pietrzak is Professor of British and Irish Literature at the Institute of English Studies, University of ¿ód¿, Poland. His main areas of interest are modernist and contemporary Anglophone poetry as well as theory and philosophy of literature. He has published The Critical Thought of W. B. Yeats and numerous essays on contemporary British and Irish poetry.

Acknowledgments

List of abbreviations

Introduction

Chapter 1. Shared worlds, shared voices: the work of empathy in elegies for family and friends

Chapter 2. Vision and revision: paternal elegies

Chapter 3. Poetry and politics in elegies for poets and literati

Chapter 4. Mourning bare life: transnational elegies

Chapter 5. Tradition of defiance: Lamentations

Chapter 6. Between speech and silence: war elegies

Works cited

Index

The book is the first study of Paul Muldoon's elegiac poetry. It covers virtually all of his elegies, showing how the elegiac attitude has underlain Muldoon's poetic development and shaped his aesthetics and formal developments, as it also demonstrates the extent to which Muldoon's elegies have transformed the genre