Introduction & Overview of Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead by Andrew Hudgins

Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead Introduction

"Elegy for My Father, Who Is Not Dead" was published by Houghton Mifflin, in 1991, in The Never-Ending, Andrew Hudgins's third volume of poems. The poem calls itself an "elegy" in the first half of the title, and thus we expect to hear a poetic lament for someone who has died. But Hudgins puts a strange twist on the ancient genre, elegia . This poem is an elegy for someone who is not yet dead, namely, the poet's father. In the first two lines, Hudgins voices for many readers that secret dread of hearing that a parent has died. The poem anticipates mourning for his father, but because he is "not dead," another kind of elegy is also at work. Death will be one sort of distance eventually separating father from son; meanwhile, there are vast distances between them in life. His father, "in the sureness of his faith," is...
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