Abstract

Since the mid-to-late '80s, AIDS has become part of contemporary society. That literary representation of AIDS are now surfacing is thus not unexpected. And, given the homosexual community's early encounter with AIDS, it is equally unsurprising that an extraordinary amount of what is known as AIDS Literature originates in that community. The elegy, a traditional poetic form used to memorialize the dead, is undergoing a resurgence in popularity, especially in the latest collections of gay poets. The contemporary gay elegy is therefore a compelling field on which to examine AIDS themes in gay literature. Canvassing the gay elegies of James Merrill and Richard Howard, this study exposes motifs and themes particular to memorializing a gay ADDS death. The study begins by establishing some parameters of pre-AIDS gay elegiac form by discussing Merrill's The Changing Light at Sandover (1982); it then moves on to an examination of the elegies in Merrill's The Inner Room (1988), in which images of AIDS figure, and finally it illustrates that the AIDS themes and motifs noted in Merrill are distinctly rendered in Richard Howard's AIDS elegies in Like Most Revelations (1995). Their works record both the present cultural moment and a progression of gay elegiac form.