It might be said that no civilization has existed without both death and poetry. These two cultural registers, one reflecting the transience of individual life and the other the imperishability of art, have helped define civilizations across time and geography. In fact, death and poetry exhibit a sort of synergy, poetry both reacting to and flowing from the pain and sorrow of grieving in a process suggesting that maybe, as Wallace Stevens said, death is in fact the mother of beauty.

Why is there such a close relationship between death and poetry? What is it about poetry that makes it such a powerful vehicle for voicing and channeling grief? Perhaps the answer lies in poetry's ability to give formal structure and meaning to the inchoate and seemingly boundless feelings of death. Compressing all-consuming emotion into a regular meter like iambic pentameter can offer some degree of control and agency in a time of apparent helplessness. Maybe poetry, by its very formal conventions, serves as a filter through which feelings of grief and suffering can be mediated, a prism in reverse that takes disparate feelings and thoughts and unifies them into some semblance of unity and meaning.

Indeed, what is it about death itself that paradoxically makes it such a fertile ground for mankind's most life-affirming creative act? Why is it that death so often provides a portal through which we enter the very heart of the imaginative process? Perhaps it is because when we encounter the sudden loss of a loved one, we are forced to face the fact that death is an unselective suitor, that it will one day come to claim one's own life. We are confronted with the hypothetical turned inexorable, with the imaginative question—how will it end?—that haunts us all. Whatever one calls such a transference of the self into another's situation—Wordsworthian pity, Adam Smith's moral sense, or simply an act of imagination—it is clear that it lies at the heart of poetic creation. Death provokes poetry because it provokes the imagination, sometimes sympathetically, sometimes terrifyingly, but always powerfully.

In her new and compelling study, Death's Door: Modern Dying and the Ways We Grieve, poet and University of California, Davis, professor of English Sandra Gilbert takes up this complex and fascinating relationship which has marked human society since time immemorial. How, if at all, have the events of the 20th century fundamentally altered both how we view death and how we picture the dying, both how we mourn and how we move on? Gilbert contends that, while death may appear the one unchanging fact of existence, in actuality it is deeply influenced and changed by history and the turbulent currents of events and philosophies. As she writes, "The deaths of charismatic leaders, the dissolution of old ideas, the destruction of traditional customs, the disintegration of antiquated social structures—all these demolitions of the past prepare and constitute the cultural transformations we call history even while the history they beget shapes what we call the modern and its notions of death." In an almost Keatsian formulation, death makes history, and history makes death. This, however, is not all we know or need to know, and Gilbert's book goes on to examine precisely how history has transformed death in the modern world and what this one shift in the perception of death means for our own culture and the poetry that it produces.

For Gilbert, the key to understanding the vast disparities between modern mourning and its predominantly Christian antecedents lies in the movement from seeing death as an "expiration" to envisioning it as a "termination." In an unpacking of broadly used terms that is typical of the meticulous precision of her words, Gilbert explains, "Because the word 'expire' has roots in the Latin spiritus (meaning 'breath') in which our concept of spirit originates, it means both 'to breathe out' and 'to breathe one's last' but also implies 'to breathe out the spirit or soul.'" To expire is to release life's animating principle, to free it from the contingencies of its mortal casing and allow it the freedom to move towards salvation. Expiration is, even at the level of etymology, a spiritually charged concept, a view of death emphasizing the life to come rather than the life recently ended. In contrast, the word "termination," Gilbert tells us, "originates in the Latin terminus for 'end' or boundary' and means simply to 'reach a terminus' or 'come to an end in time.'" Where expiration speaks of a gentle release, termination indicates a violent and painful end. Expiration is an ellipse, hinting at an ethereal future that is yet to come; termination is an end stop, unsentimental, harsh, and, above all else, final.

Thankfully, Gilbert avoids the temptation to declare a gradual, evolving historical and literary transition into a clear, steadfast line of distinction. It's not that poets before the 20th century viewed death solely as benevolent and cathartic, or that 20th century poets exclusively see death in its cold, hard facts. Emily Dickinson's poetry, for instance, in its coiled ironies and voids of meaning, clearly illustrates that death was not so easily and universally assimilated into the 19 th century consciousness; likewise, much 9/11 poetry sought some sort of spiritual release in the wake of such human tragedy. The change from expiration to termination has been measured in pace and has advanced by fits and starts. It is a change, however, that is evident in the evolution of elegiac poetry and one that must be accounted for by the historical and philosophical events that have made it possible.

If the 20th century has fundamentally altered how we think about death and essentially posited "termination" as the only valid form of understanding it, how has this transformation been brought about? Gilbert finds the depersonalizing forces of modern history and culture at the heart of this paradigm shift. World War I, with its advent of long-range war and its miles of rat-infested battlefields and corpses; World War II, with its scientifically perfected techniques of annihilation at Auschwitz and the looming specter of the atomic bomb; the ever-burgeoning AIDS epidemic wracking inner cities and the African continent: all have irreversibly changed how we view and think about death and the dying. In a world where death is a tool perfected by scientific knowledge and wielded on behalf of brutal power, what space can a spiritual and idealized death occupy? Death is no longer the territory of spirituality but has rather been ceded to physicality, the corpse replacing the soul as the primary symbol of the departed. Death is no more a Shakespearian undiscovered country; we have been terrifyingly privy to its broad boundaries and we have witnessed its cold, insidious practices.

Gilbert does not simply rely upon word sleuthing to prove this historical transformation of death and dying. Rather, her study is a veritable potpourri of different disciplines through which she gazes at culture and art to prove her thesis—anthropology, photography, history, autobiography, psychology, and, of course, poetry. Her work is capacious, each discipline treated finding space that is neither cramped nor forced. Although not formally trained as a critic of photography, Gilbert's attention to this art form's role in transforming how we view death is acute. She cites Sontag and Barthes with facility and understanding, and carefully delineates how photos helped the transition from a "regarding" of the departed, respectful and even wistful, to a coldly objective "looking" at corpses, in which all vestiges of religious or sentimental succor have been eradicated. As her project began with the painful loss of her own husband, Gilbert also effectively intersperses memoir throughout, at times using peculiar and affecting memories to add levity and the human touch to a book often coldly in the shadow of mortality, at other times utilizing her own personal sorrow to magnify what other poets have identified as the central experiences of mourning. Such a vast array of methods and fields of study would wreak havoc on a weaker thinker, but Gilbert avoids getting lost in technical jargon or minute details. She is able to marshal her material into a coherent argument by continually reflecting back on the central distinction between expiration and termination.

If her use of sources is restless, refusing to settle into any one specific discipline or area of inquiry, then her prose style itself is thoroughly rooted, finding its distinctive voice in Gilbert's past as a poet. Her turns of phrase are truly poetic—succinct, searing, original. Like all good poets, she relies upon reversal and reorientation, discomfiting the reader and forcing him to take a new view on a seemingly staid subject. Above all else, however, Gilbert reveals her poetic past in her true love of words. This love is deep, fundamental, almost tactile. She takes great pleasure in playing with words—handling them, probing them, and dwelling in the lacunae of their meanings. Gilbert clearly admires and is haunted by the poetry of Silvia Plath, the tortured artist serving as a kind of distorted avatar for the grief-stricken academic. It is only appropriate then that Gilbert is Plathian in her attention to the etymology of words. Just as she mines the roots of the words "expire" and "termination," she digs into the origins of "widow," finding in its roots the French vide, meaning empty, a hint at the terrifying nullity of a widow's existence in the eyes of society. Gilbert has a poet's respect for the rootedness of all language. She couples this with an innate ability to reshuffle a reader's traditional perspective, and it makes for a prose style that is one of the strengths of her work.

At the end, however, after having examined the atrocities of the past century and the seismic shift in perspective that it engendered, Gilbert circles back to our original question: what is the ultimate reason that death so often evokes poetry? After all, Death's Door, a work infused with poetry and the poetic process, was itself provoked by the death of a beloved and its attendant grief. Gilbert finds many reasons to explain this phenomenon. Through poetry we try to write/right wrong, she claims, giving our own personal perspective on a process that oftentimes leaves us feeling so powerless, rewriting a past that is often too painful to grasp. Beyond this rewriting, we gain one last chance to commune with the dead through poetry, to feel their spirit and to hauntingly hear their voices. Above all else, Gilbert contends, poetry makes us a witness to death, a voice that proclaims death's reality and its resulting pain. By proclaiming our sorrow, we in a way make the sorrow real, speak it into existence, and confront rather than hide from pain. This, Gilbert maintains, is a noble task, one that aids us when death's door swings so violently and suddenly open in front of us. One would be hard-pressed to ask for a more powerful witness than Gilbert herself.

Review to the contrary, Anthony Domestico '07 also enjoys more light-hearted fare, such as "Tom Brady: There's No Expiration Date on Dreams" and "Catcher with a Glass Arm.".