Max Cavitch

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Karl Abraham, "A Short Study of the Development of the Libido"
Nicholas Abraham, "Notes on the Phantom"
Nicholas Abraham & Maria Torok, "Notes on Endocryptic Identification"
---, "Mourning or Melancholia: Introjection versus Incorporation" 
John Quincy Adams, "Ode to Jefferson"
Joseph Addison, Spectator #411-#421
Theodor Adorno, "The Essay as Form"
---, "On Lyric Poetry and Society"
---, "The Meaning of Working Through the Past" (1959)
Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats"
Sherman Alexie, "Amusements"
---, "A Train Is an Order of Occurrence"
Benedict Anderson, "Memory and Forgetting"
William Apess, "Eulogy on King Philip" (1836)
Aristotle, "On Memory and Reminiscence"
David Armitage, "Three Concepts of Atlantic History"
Matthew Arnold, from Culture and Anarchy (1869)
---, "The Study of Poetry" (1880)
W. H. Auden, "In Memory of Sigmund Freud" (1939)
---, "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" (1939)
---, "The Unknown Citizen" (1939)
Augustine, Confessions, book 10
Francis Bacon, from The Great Instauration (1620)
James Baldwin, "Encounter on the Seine (1950)
---, "Equal in Paris" (1955)
---, "An Interview...on Henry James (1986)
---, "The New Lost Generation" (1961)
---, "A Question of Identity" (1954)
---, "This Morning, This Evening, So Soon" (1960)
Jane Barker, "On the Death of My Brother"
---, "On the Death of My Dear Friend"
Allen Barnett, "Philostorgy, Now Obscure"
Georges Bataille, Eroticism, Introduction
Katharine Lee Bates, "America the Beautiful" (1895)
Charles Baudelaire, "New Notes on Edgar Poe"
Sidney Bechet, from Treat It Gentle (1960)
Aphra Behn, "On the Death of...Rochaester"
George Berkeley, "On the Prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America" (1752)
Walter Benjamin, "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" (1936)
Paula Bernat Bennett, Introduction to Nineteenth-Century American Women Poets (1998)
Sacvan Bercovitch, "The Vision of History," from Puritan Origins of the American Self (1975)
Lauren Berlant, "The Female Woman" (1991)
Lauren Berlant & Michael Warner, "What Does Queer Theory Teach Us about X?" (1995)
John Berryman, "Homage to Mistress Bradstreet" (1953)
---, "The marker slants..."
---, "Wash Far Away"
---, "Your Birthday in Wisconsin You Are 140"
Bhagavad Gita, chs. 8-12
Elizabeth Bishop, "North Haven"
---, "One Art"
David Blight, from Race and Reunion (2001)
Harold Bloom, "Apophrades"
Jay Bochner, "The Marriage of Rogue and The Soil" (2008)
Luc Bolatanski, "The Aesthetic Topic" (1993)
Jorge Luis Borges, "Funes, the Memorious"
T. Coraghesan Boyle, "Captured by the Indians" (1999)
Anne Bradstreet, "To the Memory of My...Father" (1653)
Mitchell Robert Breitwieser, "The Society of the Example"
John Brenkman, "The Concrete Utopia of Poetry: Blake's 'A Poison Tree'" (1985)
Philip Bromberg, "The Nearness of You" (2010)
---, from Standing in the Spaces (1998) 
Emily Brontë, "No coward soul is mine" (1846)
---, "Remembrance" (1845)
---, "Stanzas" (1840)
William Wells Brown, "St. Domingo" (1854)
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, "L.E.L.'s Last Question" (1844)
---, "Mother and Poet" (1861)

Orestes Brownson, Oration ["American Literature"] (1839)
---, "The Laboring Classes" (1840)
William Cullen Bryant, "An Indian at the Burying-Place of His Fathers" (1824)
---, "The Prairies" (1832)
---, "A Story of the Island of Cuba" (1830)
---, "Summer Wind" (1824)
---, "Thanatopsis"
---, "To an American Painter Departing for Europe" (1829)
---, "To a Waterfowl"
Joseph Stevens Buckminster, "Social Blessings of Americans"
Lord Byron, Thyrza poems
Thomas Carlyle, "Characteristics" (1831)
Anne Carson, "Sumptuous Destitution"
Willa Cather, "Paul's Case"
Max Cavitch, "American Constitutional Elegy" (2010)
---, "Audience Terminable and Interminable" (2005)
---, "Dickinson and the Exception" (2008)

---, "Dissociative Reading--Philip Bromberg and Emily Dickinson" (2007)
---, "Emma Lazarus and the Golem of Liberty" (2008)
---, "Interiority and Artifact: Death and Self-Inscription in Thomas Smith's Self-Portrait" (2002)
---, "Retrievements Out of the Night," from American Elegy (207)
---, "Sex after Death: François Ozon's Libidinal Invasions" (2007)
---, "Slavery and Its Metrics" (2011)
---, "Stephen Crane's Refrain" (2008)
William Ellery Channing, Farley ordination sermon ["Likeness to God"] (1828)
Geoffrey Chaucer, "The Book of the Duchess" (c. 1370)
Lydia Maria Child, "Slavery's Pleasant Homes" (1843)
E. M. Cioran, "Mechanism of Utopia"
Amy Clampitt, "Amherst"
---, "A Procession at Candlemas"
Cheryl Clarke, "A Poet's Death"
Lucille Clifton, "The Lost Baby Poem" (1972)
J. M. Coetzee, "Taking Offense" (1996)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge,
"On the Slave Trade" (1796)
---, opium letters (1814-32)
Marquis de Condorcet, "Future Progress of Mankind" (1795)
Peter Coviello, "Agonizing Affection"
Abraham Cowley, "On the Death of Mrs. Katherine Philips" (1667)
Hart Crane, "To Emily Dickinson" (1927)
Stephen Crane, selected poems (1895, 1899)
Robert Creeley, "Reflections on Whitman in Age"
Stanley Crouch, "Blues to Be Constitutional" (1995)
Countee Cullen, "Lament"
---, "Threnody for a Brown Girl"
Samuel Danforth, "A Brief Recognition of New-Englands Errand into the Wilderness" (1670)
Lucretia Davidson, "Auction Extraordinary"
---, "Lines Written under the Promise of Reward"
Rebecca Harding Davis, "Life in the Iron-Mills" (1861)
Declaration of Sentiments (1848)
Philip Deloria, from Playing Indian (1998)
Paul de Man, "Autobiography as De-Facement"
Jacques Derrida, "The Law of Genre" (1980)
Deuteronomy
Philip K. Dick, "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale"
Melvin Dixon, "One by One" (1989)
Mark Doty, "Tiara" (1991)
Frederick Douglass, letter from Paris (1887)
Michael Drayton, "To the Virginian Voyage" (1606)
John Dryden, "To the Pious Memory of...Mrs. Anne Killigrew" (1686)
W. E. B. Du Bois, "Of the Passing of the First-Born"
Jane Donahue Eberwein, "Is Immortality True?" (2004)
Jonathan Edwards, "Types" (c. 1746-56)
Mircea Eliade, "Mythologies of Memory and Forgetting" (1963)
Samuel Elsworth, "Solemn Predictions" (1787)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Ode, Inscribed to W. H. Channing"
---, Parisian letters and journals (1833, 1848)
---, "The Poet" (1844)
---, "Threnody" (1846)
---, "Voluntaries" (1867)
Edward Everett, "Oration [Phi Beta Kappa]" (1824)
Michael Field, "Solitary Death, make me thine own" (1893)
Annie Finch, from The Ghost of Meter (1993)
Charles Grandison Finney, "What a Revival of Religion Is" (1834)
Stanley Fish, "There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too" (1994)
F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Bridal Party" (1930)
---, "Babylon Revisited" (1931)
Richard Foerster, "Emily Dickinson in Boston, 1864-65"
Ed Folsom et al., cluster on Whitman and "database as genre" (2007)
Michel Foucault, "Different Spaces" (1984)
---, "What Is an Author?" (1969)
Charles Fourier, selections from The Theory of the Four Movements (1808)
Benjamin Franklin, self-epitaph
Philip Freneau, "The Indian Burying Ground" (1787)
---, "On the Emigration to America and Peopling the Western Country" (1785)
---, "The Prophecy of King Tammany" (1782)
Sigmund Freud, "Mourning and Melancholia"
---, "The Uncanny" (1919)
Margaret Fuller, "The Great Lawsuit" (1843)
Hamlin Garland, "The Return of a Private" (1890)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., "Phillis Wheatley on Trial" (2003)
William Gibson, "Johnny Mnemonic" (1987)
Anne Gilchrist, "A Woman's Estimate of Walt Whitman" (1870)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, "The Yellow Wall-Paper" (1893)
Allen Ginsberg, "First Manifesto to End the Bringdown" (1966)
---, "Kaddish" (1961)
Malcolm Gladwell, "The Naked Face" (2002)
Judy Grahn, "A Funeral Plainsong from a Younger Woman to an Older Woman"
Janet Gray, Introduction to She Wields a Pen (1997)
Thomas Gray, "Elegy Written in a Country Church-Yard"
---, "Sonnet on the Death of Richard West"
Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Preface to The Female Poets of America (1849)
Allen Grossman, "The Poetics of Union in Whitman and Lincoln: An Inquiry toward the Relationship of Art and Policy" (1985)
---, "Whitman's 'Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand': Remarks on the Endlesly Repeated Rediscovery of the Incommensurability of the Person" (1996)
Thom Gunn, "A Blank"
---, "Death's Door"
---, "In the Post Office"
---, "The Missing"
Marilyn Hacker, "Autumn 1980"
---, "Ballad of Ladies Lost and Found"
Thomas Hardy, Poems of 1912-13
Michael Harper, "Deathwatch"
---, "Kneading"
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "The Old Manse" (1846)
Vicki Hearne, "Oyez à Beaumont" (1993)
Thomas Wentworth Higginson, "Emily Dickinson's Letters" (1891)
---, "A Letter to a Young Contributor"
---, "Ought Women to Learn the Alphabet?"
Geoffrey Hill, "September Song" (1994)
Edward Hirsch, "The Unnaming"
John Hollander, "Breaking into Song: Some Notes on Refrain"
Oliver Wendell Holmes, "The Physiology of Versification"
Julia Ward Howe, "Battle-Hymn of the Republic" (1862)
W. D. Howells, "The Pilot's Story" (1860)
Washington Irving, "Rip Van Winkle"
Helen Hunt Jackson, "The Story of Boon"
Virginia Jackson, "Beforehand," from Dickinson's Misery (2005)
---, "Dickinson's Figure of Address," from Dickinson's Misery (2005)
James I, A Counter-Blaste to Tobacco (1604)
Vladimir Jankélévitch, "Temporal Decay," from Forgiveness 
Randall Jarrell, "A Sick Child" (1949)
Thomas Jefferson, Declaration of Independence (1776)
---, "Thoughts on English Prosody" (1786)
James Weldon Johnson, from Along This Way (1933)
Absalom Jones & Richard Allen, Narrative of the Proceedings (1794)
Amy Kaplan, "Left Alone with America" (1993)
Samuel Keimer, "Elegy on the Death of Aquila Rose" (1723)
Francis Scott Key, "Defence of Fort McHenry" (1814)
Henry King, "Exequy"
King, Jr., Martin Luther, "Mountaintop" sermon (April 3, 1968)
Galway Kinnell, "The Deconstruction of Emily Dickinson"
Melanie Klein, "Mourning and Its Relation to Manic Depressive States" (1940)
Richard Klein, "What Is a Cigarette?" (1993)
Igor Kopytoff, "The Cultural Biography of Things"
Dominick LaCapra, "Holocaust Testimonies: Attending to the Victim's Voice" (2001)
Frank Lambert, "Constructing a Transatlantic Awakening" (1999)
Lucy Larcom, "Geting Along"
---, "A Loyal Woman's No"
D. H. Lawrence, "Whitman" (1923)
Emma Lazarus, "The Crowing of the Red Cock" (1882)
---, "In the Jewish Synagogue at Newport" (1871)
John Locke, from Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690)
Book 1
Book 2, chapter 1
Book 2, chapter 10
Book 2, chapter 27
---, from Some Thoughts Concerning Education (1693)
Mary Loeffelholz, "Elegy and (Un)knowing" (1991)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "The Cross of Snow"
---, Evangeline (1847)
---, "Picture-Writing" (1855)
Nicole Loraux, "Of Amnesty and Its Opposite" (1998)
Amy Lowell, "The Sisters" (1922)
Robert Lowell, "Commander Lowell"
Stéphane Mallarmé, "Crisis of Verse" (1897)
John Markland, "Typographia. An Ode on Printing" (1730)
Andrew Marvell, "Bermudas"
Cotton Mather, elegy for Urian Oakes
---, from Magnalia Christi Americana (1702)
Attestation, Poems, General Introduction, etc.
Book I, chs. 1-4
Book II, ch. 4 ("Nehemias Americanus")
---, on poetry, from Manuductio Ministerium (1726)
Herman Melville, "Bartleby, The Scriviner"
---, "Billy in the Darbies" (1891)
---, "'The Coming Storm'" (1866)
---, "'Formerly a Slave'" (1866)
---, "Hawthorne and His Mosses"
---, "I and My Chimney"
---, "Magnanimity Baffled" (1866)
---, "The Martyr" (1866)
---, "The Swamp Angel"(1866)
James Merrell, "Conversations"
W. S. Merwin, "For the Anniversary of My Death (1969)
Perry Miller, from Errand into the Wilderness (1956)
John Milton, Areopagitica
---,  "Lycidas"
---, from Paradise Lost, Book 9 (1674)
Paul Monette, "Brother of the Mount of Olives" (1988)
---, "No Goodbyes" (1988)
Michel de Montaigne, "Of Lyers" (1603)
Sarah Wentworth Morton, "The African Chief" (1792)
Lucretia Mott, "Abuses and Uses of the Bible" (1849)
Judith Sargent Muray, "On the Equality of the Sexes" (1779)
John Newton, "Amazing Grace" (1779)
Grace Nichols, "Tropical Death" (1984)
Elizabeth Oakes-Smith, "Ode to Sappho"
---, "The Poet"
Samson Occom, "A Short Narrative of My Life" (1768) and "A Sermon" (1772)
Frank O'Hara, "The Day Lady Died"
Sharon Olds, "Best Friends" (2000)
---, "Emily Dickinson's Writing Table"
---, "Miscarriage" (2000)
---, "Of All the Dead That Have Come to me, This Once" (2000)
---, "Portrait of a Child" (2000)
Alicia Ostriker, "Frowning at Emily"
Wilfred Owen, "Futility" (1918)
Camille Paglia, "Amherst's Madame de Sade"
Robert Perelman, "A Williams Sound-Script: Listening to 'The Sea-Elephant'" (2007)
Marjorie Perloff, "'Lines Converging and Crossing': The 'French' Decade of William Carlos Williams" (1983)
---, "'To Give a Design': Williams and the Visualization of Poetry" (1983)
Christopher Phillips, "Lighting Out for the Rough Ground: America's Epic Origins and the Richness of World Literature" (2007)
Sylvia Plath, "Daddy" (1966)
Plato, Apology
Edgar Allan Poe, "Annabel Lee"
---, "The Black Cat" (1843)
---, "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846)
---, "How to Write a Blackwood Article" (1838)
---, "Letter to B--"
---, "The Man of the Crowd"
---, "Morning on the Wissahiccon"
---, "The Pit and the Pendulum"
---, "The Rationale of Verse" (1848)
---, "The Raven"
---, reviews of Longfellow's Ballads (1842)
---, "The Sleeper"
---, "Ulalume--A Ballad"
Vivian Pollak, "Sisterhood" (1984)
Alexander Pope, "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" (1717)
---, "Epitaph. On Himself"
Psalm 23 (Geneva)
Psalm 137 (Geneva)
Psalm 137 (Lemuel Hopkins)
Quintilian, on memory, from Institutio oratoria
Thomas Randolph, "An Elegy upon the Lady Venetia Digby"
Patrick Reding, "Whitman Unbound: Democracy and Poetic Form, 1912-1931" (2010)
The Revelation of John the Divine (Geneva)
The Revelation of St. John (KJV)
Donald Revell, "Emily Dickinson's Mirror, Amherst"
Adrienne Rich, "After Dark" (1964)
---, "For Memory" (1979)
---, "From an Old House in America" (1974)
---, "I Am in Danger--Sir--"
---, "In Memoriam: D. K." (1986)
---, "The Spirit of Place" (1980)
---, "A Woman Dead in Her Forties" (1978)
Paul Ricoeur, "Difficult Forgiveness" (2004)
Edward Arlington Robinson, "Reuben Bright" (1897)
Theodore Roethke, "Elegy for Jane"
Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia" (1989)
Philip Round, "Public Writing II"
Barton Levi St. Armand, "Dark Parade: Dickinson, Sigourney, and the Victorian Way of Death" (1984)
Saint Paul, Letter to the Romans
Avgi Saketopoulou, "Minding the Gap" (2011)
George Santayana, "The Genteel Tradition in American Philosophy" (1913)
---, "To W. P."
Henry Sayre, "Ready-mades and Other Measures: The Poetics of Marcel Duchamp and William Carlos Williams" (1980)
Anne Sexton, "A Curse Against Elegies"
---, "The Division of Parts"
Percy Byshhe Shelley, "Adonais"
Lydia Sigourney, "Death of a Young Lady at the Retreat for the Insane"
---, "Funeral of Mazeen"
---, "To a Shred of Linen"
---, "To the First Slave Ship"
Leslie Marmon Silko, "Yellow Woman"
Samuel Francis Smith, "America" (1831)
Edmund Spenser, "Astrophel"
---, from The Faerie Queene, Book 2 (1590)
Wallace Stevens, "Williams" (1934)
---, "Description without Place" (1945)
Harriet Beecher Stowe, "The Two Altars" (1851)
Lee Stringer, from Grand Central Winter (1998)
Jonathan Swift, "A Modest Proposal"
---, "A Satirical Elegy on the Death of a Late Famous General"
Algernon Charles Swinburne, "Ave Atque Vale"
Alfred Lord Tennyson, "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" (1852)
Dylan Thomas, "A Refusal to Mourn the Death, By Fire, of a Child in London"
Henry David Thoreau, "Life Without Principle" (1854/63)
---, "A Plea for Captain John Brown" (1859)
---, "Resistance to Civil Government" (1849)
---, "Slavery in Massachusetts" (1854)
---, "Walking"
Chidiock Tichborne, "Tychbornes Elegie" (1586)
Alexis de Tocqueville, from Democracy in America (1835-40)
Maria Torok, "The Illness of Mourning and the Fantasy of the Exquisite Corpse" (1968)
Alan Trachtenberg, "Singing Hiawatha" (2004)
---, "Singing Hiawatha" (part 2)
Carl Van Vechten, from Peter Whiffle (1922)
Voltaire, "Memory's Adventure" (1773)
Michael Warner, "The Ethics of Sexual Shame" (1999)
---, "The Novel: Fantasies of Publicity" (1990)
---, "Whitman Drunk" (2002)
Angelina Grimke Weld, speech given at Pennsylvania Hall (1838)
John Wesley, "Thoughts upon Slavery" (1774)
Westminster Confession (1647)
John Whaley, "On a Young Lady's Weeping at Oroonooko" (1732)
Walt Whitman, "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry"
---, "The Eighteenth Presidency!"
---, "I Sing the Body Electric"
---, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)
---, "Reconciliation"
---, "Vigil Strange I Kept on the Field One Night" (1865)
---, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" (1865)
John Greenleaf Whitter, "Address" (1838)
---, "Barbara Frietchie"
---, "The Haschish"
---, "Snow-Bound"
---, "What the Birds Said"
John Edgar Wideman, "Fever"
Leon Wieseltier, "Postscript: Susannah McCorkle" (2001)
Raymond Williams, "Sex," from Keywords (1983)
William Carlos Williams, "America, Whitman, and the Art of Poetry" (1917)
---, "The Poem as a Field of Action" (1948)
---, "The Practice" (1951)
---, "An Essay on Leaves of Grass" (1955)
John Willis, Mnemonica (1618 Latin; 1661 English)

Preface and Book I
Book II
Book III, chs. 1-9; chs. 10-13; chs. 14-17
Treatise of Cherishing Natural Memory
Constance Fenimore Woolson, "Miss Grief" (1880)
William Wordsworth, "Laodamia" (1815)
---, "Surprised by Joy"
---, "Three Years She Grew in Sun and Shower" (1800)
Richard Wright, "American Negroes in France" (1951)
William Butler Yeats, "The Wild Swans at Coole"