Elegy for Nicholas Heiney: more questions than answers?

My PhD was about the elegy, a type of poem that laments a death. Although that sounds pretty straightforward, the idea of a work of art being inspired by grief can become quite complex.

Writing about a famous person or a well-known tragedy instantly becomes political (that is without the assumption that all poetry is political, but that’s a discussion for another time). Writing about your own loss involves processing your grief in a very public fashion (assuming that your poem will be read by others); and the loss of a person rarely only affects a single mourner, so the elegist’s personal grief response must also engage with or at least acknowledge the grief of the community of people mourning that loss. (More on this soon…)

Perhaps more complex is the idea of writing an elegy for a complete stranger. Is it ethical to create a work of art that expresses a grief that is not your own? Would the grief be ‘artificial’? (Is artifice a bad thing?) Can a poet be a ‘professional mourner’ on behalf of someone else? Do you need to get their permission, if so? Is it exploitative to make art, and perhaps a name for oneself as a writer, from someone else’s grief? (Did Milton capitalise on Edward King’s death when he wrote Lycidas; did Shelley, when he wrote Adonais for Keats? Did Andrew Motion jump on the People’s Princess bandwagon when he elegised Princess Diana?)

These questions were considered, in a largely theoretical way, during my research. They became more real a few months ago, when I was given a book by a good friend. The Silence at the Song’s End is a collection of writing – journals, sea logs and poems – by Nicholas Heiney, edited by his mother, Libby Purves, and his university tutor, Duncan Wu. Nicholas took his own life in 2006, while in his early twenties, after ‘a long and well-concealed battle with severe mental disturbance’. I loved this book: Nicholas was an excellent writer. Reading the collection, lovingly curated by his mother, was an emotional experience for me, and my response was the desire to write an elegy for Nicholas. Yet, I am somewhat paralysed by the questions I’ve already voiced here, and many more besides.

I do, however, believe that poetry can help to explore grief and mourning, and even seems to be a natural response to loss. Poems are often read at funerals and are almost always found at roadside tributes and sites of tragedy. So I will continue wrestling with these questions, and try to write elegies for strangers like Nicholas, and also for the lost ones dear to me.