Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War

In doing so, all these elegists undercut the widespread understandings of elegy at the time as, as Andrea Brady puts it, building "paper monuments" that, outlasting the mere matter of bodies and marble memorials, offered durable memory of the dead alongside understanding and closure for th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inELH Vol. 90; no. 3; pp. 609 - 637
Main Author Gray, Catharine
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Baltimore Johns Hopkins University Press 01.09.2023
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Summary:In doing so, all these elegists undercut the widespread understandings of elegy at the time as, as Andrea Brady puts it, building "paper monuments" that, outlasting the mere matter of bodies and marble memorials, offered durable memory of the dead alongside understanding and closure for the mourners.2 As they negotiate the tense relations between received understandings of elegy and new experiences and media, these multiple poets do not so much produce artifices of eternity as develop a presentist, even journalistic, poetic, as they use war deaths to index the everyday deaths of wartime and thus help figure an emergent structure of feeling: of the swift and open-endedly repetitious nature of their heavily militarized and mediatized moment. "11 According to the historian Daniel Woolf, the increased reach, density, and regularity of the news even helped create a newly pressing "public present," a widely held sense of the importance and collective nature of a shared contemporaneity.12 Though the temporal consequences of news were multiple, therefore, its immediacy effects, alongside the recurring nature of periodical newsbooks, helped frame the civil war period less as a single, dramatic event and more as what Jerome Christensen, contrasting theater and journalism as nineteenth-century war media, calls "a condition of eventfulness": the "simulation of dailiness" as a proliferating sequence of vivid martial episodes, whose intensity and inconclusiveness were shaped by the urgent and repeating rhythms of periodical journalism—and, we could add, the violent events they mediated.13 British national violence and its media did not quite manufacture the empty, clocked time of Benedict Anderson's national synchronic simultaneity. Instead this wartime public present—a temporal correlative of the seventeenth-century public sphere, perhaps—was in part experienced as a form of accelerated and serialized plenitude, an intensified social simultaneity measured by not just dates but contested and unreliably reported violent events that were, for contemporaries at least, of national, international, and cosmic significance.14 Though sometimes printed in book collections, these published war elegies could intersect with the circulation, print formats, and publishing networks of this "eventful" periodical news culture, both part of and adding to the plenitude of their moment: broadside elegies, for example, proliferating in this period, were published in the same "topical printed forms" as, and marketed to readers of, the news.15 Newsbooks and battle pamphlets increasingly included elegiac verse, whether as lines of lament in introductory poems or full elegies for military men, the latter sometimes satirical or "premature. "16 Throughout the bellicose 1640s in particular, the genre appeared in a variety of cheap "small book" formats, including not only the broadside but also the short quarto pamphlet, and was produced by and for the publishers and sellers of news, such as Robert Austin, Andrew Coe, and Henry Hall.17 Civil war readers, therefore, would regularly encounter print war elegies in the same books, bookshops, and formats as the polemical and journalistic reports of battles and deaths that filled the many ephemeral print forms of the period.
ISSN:0013-8304
1080-6547
1080-6547
DOI:10.1353/elh.2023.a907203