“Elena is Dying”: Preemptive Elegy and the Ethics of Hospice in the Poetry of William Carlos Williams

William Carlos Williams has often been regarded as a prototypical modern elegist, stripping sentimentality from poetic treatments of death. Similarly, his training in the emerging field of modern scientific medicine has led scholars to focus on his so-called “clinical” or “objective” style. Yet a more complex picture emerges from elegiac poems he wrote for his paternal grandmother and mother. Many of these poems were written while their subject was still alive and therefore have not been read as elegies. Yet these preemptive or anticipatory elegies draw on traditional tropes of pastoral elegy, while also critiquing modern medical approaches to end-of-life treatment. In the process, these poems form a new subgenre of elegy made possible by medical advances that lengthened lifespans in the twentieth century, while at the same time sharing the ethics of care over cure that would motivate hospice reformers such as Dame Cicely Saunders and Elisabeth Kübler-Ross in the decades after the poems appeared. While medical humanities sometimes treat literary texts as instruments for establishing standards of medical ethics and empathy, attention to these poems should encourage us to reverse that approach and instead understand medical humanist texts as expressing ethical lessons that emerge from the hands-on practice of medical professionals themselves.