With an Indifference to the Geography of Home

Erstwhile explores elegy’s resistance to consolation, faith, and closure, engaging both critically and creatively with the ways grief lingers. At its core, this project is an interrogation of loss—how we speak to the dead, how they speak back, and what remains unresolved in that exchange. My poems, centered on the death of my brother, extend outward to elegies for landscapes, histories, and imagined futures. Nature becomes both witness and participant, reflecting the way grief moves, vast and uncontained. The critical introduction situates my work within the tradition of poets who have wrestled with grief’s shape—John Milton’s formal resolve, Charlotte Smith’s untethered mourning, William Wordsworth’s return to memory, and Ted Kooser’s quiet intimacies of loss. Drawing from Jahan Ramazani’s Poetry of Mourning, I examine how contemporary elegy resists the closure that pastoral elegy once sought. I also question the role of faith in mourning, turning to Donald Revell’s assertion that “religion is what happens when faith becomes routine” to consider where ritual falters and what might take its place. Rather than offering resolution, this dissertation lingers in the spaces grief leaves behind. Through both poetry and critical inquiry, it suggests that elegy is not about letting go but about holding on—about keeping the dead within reach, if only through language.