In the second chapter of American Elegy, Max Cavitch explicitly positions his study as a necessary corrective to one of the dominant characteristics of Americanist cultural studies, citing the common critical “marginalization of poetic form” and the “correlative commitment to the novel as a metonymy of literary culture” (84). The case Cavitch makes for verse as the crucial material for a revisionist tracking of American political, social, and aesthetic history is grounded, commendably, in a pragmatic appraisal of literary production in the early United States. Cavitch notes that, in contrast to the novel, poetic forms were as widely produced by Americans as they were consumed, “and they were consumed voraciously” (85). Examining the functions of elegy within the civic realm and as a self-reflexive form in itself, the author's generic argument places particular significance on the monograph's structure, attempting, as it does, to reconcile the demands of “chronicle and close reading in a way that resists retrospective remediation of historical complexity” (38).

Of the features ascribed to elegiac practice, the most far-reaching seems to be what the author calls the “formation and deformation of national subjects” (84). Often voicing retrospective commitment to tradition and genealogical ties, the work of personal mourning evidences the contradictory experience of the individual tied to emergent nationalist discourses of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The study culminates in a chapter devoted to a major reading of the generative tensions between lyric subjectivity and communal rhetoric in Whitman's Lincoln elegy, “When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd.” In the five chapters preceding this, the reader is presented with a series of interlinked arguments that throw into sharp relief historical contingency and set forth the elegy as a highly politicized means of cultural transmission. The demands of nationalism are analysed through the vast quantity of elegies produced following George Washington's death. Described by Cavitch as a watershed in American commemorative practice, the event enables him to read anonymous newspaper reviews alongside the works of such established figures as Charles Brockden Brown. The popular work of William Cullen Bryant focusses discussion of the relationship between metrical form and attitudes toward death. Bryant, as one example of the many white authors of American Indian laments, also foregrounds the connections between elegy and cultural appropriation during the era of Jacksonian expansionism. However, the paradoxes that Cavitch traces in the elegy are most fully engaged in the extensive attention he gives to African American mourning. Within the condition of slavery, conceptualizations of death, social identity, and generational continuity are devastatingly altered. The readings of the ‘slave suicide’ in these elegies, often figured as a repudiation of submissive doctrines, provide invaluable insight into the social and cultural conditioning of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It is a credit to the format of Cavitch's book that they emerge so lucidly and forcefully.