Grief and Language (In)adequacy: Contemporary Elegies of Eileen Myles and Ada Limón

Abstract

This article explores how two contemporary poets, Eileen Myles and Ada Limón, confront grief, situating their work within a post-experimental context where loss is embedded in the quotidian sphere. Focusing on Myles’s “Mount St. Helens” (2001) and Limón’s “The Dead Boy” (2018), the article analyzes how both poets incorporate metapoetic strategies into their elegies, foregrounding acts of naming and the impulse to immortalize the dead while remaining critically attentive to the implications of representation. The article shows how Myles and Limón situate their poetics of grief within a space that allows for multiplicity of narration, perspective, and speaking voice, shaping an ethically aware and personal elegiac practice that reworks the traditional form. While both poets draw on the legacy of experimental poetry, they do so in distinct ways: Myles emphasizes improvisation and formal disruption, whereas Limón adopts an accessible lyric style that favors immediacy and ethical tension. Together, these poems reveal how contemporary elegy transforms linguistic insufficiency, uncertainty, and lack of resolution into productive sites of reflection, suggesting new possibilities for mourning.