Sandra Gilbert, one could say, has made an amazing mental recovery from a serious event — the sudden death of her husband Elliot, chair of the English Department at UC Davis, after routine surgery. She’s channelled this and her longstanding interest in elegy in a new book, DEATH’S DOOR, and Gilbert (a profession of English at UC Davis as well) chats with Inside Higher Ed’s Scott McLemee about the book’s impetus, the stages of grieving and whether poetry might provide something that the medical system cannot:
Poets testify, bear witness to the particulars of pain, the details of loss that technology flattens or sometimes even seeks to annihilate with words like “termination.” I don’t mean to suggest that those who work among the dying — doctors in hospitals, medics on battlefields — don’t notice these details, but the language of science is in its way sedative, just as medicine’s goals are (often appropriately) sedative and palliative. Poets remind us of what really happens. They don’t take away the pain: on the contrary, they teach us how to feel it, to meet it, to know it.