Jahan Ramazani

Edgar F. Shannon Professor of Modern and Contemporary Poetry and Postcolonial Literature at the University of Virginia, winner of NEH and Guggenheim fellowships, finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, winner of the MLA¹s William Riley Parker Prize, winner of a Rhodes Scholarship, Chair of UVA¹s English department, Jahan Ramazani is a most accomplished scholar and editor. His books include the new Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry from Norton & Company, The Hybrid Muse: Postcolonial Poetry in English from the University of Chicago Press, Poetry of Mourning: The Modern Elegy from Hardy to Heaney from the University of Chicago Press, and Yeats and the Poetry of Death: Elegy, Self-Elegy, and the Sublime from Yale University Press. Ever attentive to the pleasures of literary discourse, particularly poetry, Ramazani complicates such pleasures by engaging the problems of history and politics. His work allows us to see what is distinctive about literary study and what is inextricably bound to other disciplines. Close reading combined with astute sociological investigation yields in the case of his book on elegy, for example, a sense of the modern poet¹s very different relationship to death. Recourse to psychoanalytic theory allows us to see how the modern poet almost seems to court a kind of obdurate melancholy: a grief that, in the absence of any grand consolations, refuses to be assuaged. The result is the best sort of literary and cultural history. It understands all of the variables (genre, death, practices of consolation, formal techniques, tonal preferences, etc.) to be in flux and, thus, available for new and compelling recombinations. We are fortunate to have someone of Professor Ramazani¹s stature as our second Connelly lecturer.