Elegiac Eyes is an in-depth examination of vision and spectacle in Roman love elegy. It approaches vision from the perspective of Roman cultural modes of viewing and locates its analysis in close textual readings of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. The paradoxical nature of the Roman eyes, which according to contemporary optical theories were able to penetrate and be penetrated, as well as the complex role of vision in society, provided the elegists with a productive canvas for their poems. By locating the elegists' visual games within their contemporary context, Elegiac Eyes demonstrates how the elegists were manipulating notions that were specifically Roman and familiar to their readership.

The passions were a topic of widespread interest in antiquity, as has been shown by the recent interest and research in the emotions in Greek and Roman literature. Until now, however, there has been very little focus on love elegy or its relation to contemporary philosophical positions. Yet Roman love elegy depends crucially upon the passions: without love, anger, jealousy, pity, and fear, elegy could not exist at all. The Elegiac Passion provides the first investigation of the ancient representation of jealousy in its Roman context, as well as its significance for Roman love elegy itself. The poems of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid are built upon the presumed existence of a love triangle involving poet, mistress, and rival: the very structure of elegy thus creates an ideal scenario for the arousal of jealousy. This study begins by examining the differences between the elegiac treatment of love and that of philosophy, whether Stoic or Epicurean. Ruth Caston uses the main chapters to address the depiction of jealousy in the love relationship and explores in detail the role of the senses, the role of readers--both those internal and external to the poems--, and the use of violence as a response to jealousy. Elegy provides a multi-faceted perspective on jealousy that gives us details and nuances of the experience of jealousy not found elsewhere in ancient literature. She argues that jealousy turns centrally on the question of fides. The fear of broken obligations and the consequent lack of trust are relevant not only to the love affair that forms the subject of these poems but to many other relationships represented in elegy as well. Overall, she demonstrates that jealousy is not merely the subject matter of elegy: it creates and structures elegy's various generic features. Jealousy thus provides a much more satisfying explanation for the specific character of Roman elegy than the various theories about its origins that have typically been put forward.

Lamentation of death is the traditional elegiac focus, but in the twentieth century the elegy has become characterized as well by the mourning of other kinds of loss—those personal, familial, romantic, cultural, and philosophical privations and dispossessions that have so greatly shaped the modern sensibility. According to John B. Vickery, a profound elegiac temper is itself the major trait of twentieth-century culture, registered in attitudes ranging from regret, sorrow, confusion, anger, anxiety, doubt, and alienation to outright despair. He transforms our understanding of the elegy and its relation to modernism in The Modern Elegiac Temper. Vickery offers in-depth readings of a broad sampling of British and American poems written from World War I to the present. He considers works of overlooked poets such as Vernon Watkins, George Barker, and Edith Sitwell while also attending to canonical writers such as T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, W. H. Auden, and Wallace Stevens. Taking a text-oriented rather than author- or theory-oriented approach, he discusses in turn the personal, love, cultural, and philosophical elegy and shows how war, the Great Depression, the Holocaust, and other major historical events influenced poets’ elegiac expressions. By suggesting ways in which the individual-centered concerns of the traditional elegy metamorphose under the depersonalizing lens of high modernism, Vickery reveals the modern elegy to be a finely calibrated instrument for reading and expressing, absorbing and reflecting, the modern temperament.

Best known as one of the great short story writers of the twentieth century, Raymond Carver also published several volumes of poetry and considered himself as much a poet as a fiction writer. Sandra Lee Kleppe focuses particularly on the complex literary and scientific systems that influenced Carver’s development as a writer as she makes a case for the quality of Carver’s poetic output and the centrality of poetry to Carver’s career.