The purpose of this study is twofold. First, it proposes and explores the signal revision of elegy in the Romantic period: a shift in the criterion of consolation from the object's transcendence to the subject's. Second, it articulates two distinct approaches to consolation taken by English and American Romantics. Whereas English Romanticism predicates transcendence on the repression of temporality, American transcendentalism seeks to incorporate temporality in its search for an authentic American consolation. Part I of this study concerns the English Romantic elegy in the work of Wordsworth and Shelley; Part II examines the stances on elegy of the American Romantics Emerson and Whitman.

A brief introduction focuses on how each of the Romantic elegists studied here implicates the sublime mode in a search for consolation. Each succeeding chapter centers on a close reading of a major Romantic elegy, which is supported by a consideration of the author's developing approach to the sublime in poetry and prose. Chapter One examines the revisionary tradition of pastoral elegy in its pagan and Christian phases, and culminates in a reading of Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood." Wordsworth's "intimation," an attempt to reconcile a naturalistic consolation to a transcendental one, receives harsh criticism in Shelley's Alastor; Chapter Two traces Shelley's persistent eroticization of Wordsworthian loss from Alastor to Adonais. Chapter Three turns to Emerson's anti-elegiac stance in "Threnody." Emerson's difficult search for a new language of consolation emerges from a reading of selected essays and of excerpts from the journals. The increasing fatalism of Emerson's transcendentalism reaches an impasse in "Fate," from which Whitman redeems it. In Chapter Four, Whitman's revision of the Emersonian Self proves the basis for a recovery of an American--pastoral--poetics of elegy in "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."

An Afterword considers critiques of transcendence advanced by Freud and by three 19th century women writers--Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, and Alice James--and treats speculatively the significance of psychoanalytic and feminist orientations to an interpretation of Romantic elegy.