Resistant Mourning and The Poetics of Grief_ Reading Akhmatova’s Requiem as an Anti-Elegy.pdf

The traditional elegy is a poem of mourning and memorialisation whose objective is to provide resolution and consolation to the mourner. In the 20th century, there has

been a shift in the poetics of such mourning, with the elegy becoming a site of resistant mourning that displaces consolation and replaces it with a negative dialectic that

eternally resurrects the pain of suffering and loss. In Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney, Jahan Ramazani observes the rise of the anti-elegy and

this paper reads Anna Akhmatova's seminal holocaust elegy Requiem as anti-elegy. Through an exploration of the poetics of mourning, this paper will explore how Akhmatova transgresses the devices of classical elegy in the face of incomprehensible loss to offer an aesthetic response to the psychological economy of grieving.