Sparing Fame: Anne Bradstreet's Elegiac Consolations

[...]the house featured in Ellis's frontispiece is not the home that burned. In this exchange, the trade of what I am calling personal grief for existential consolation, we find what Ramazani identifies as "the economic problem" of the elegy (6). Because the genre offers an opportunity to provide evidence of the artistic virtuosity or moral righteousness which assures elegists that they too will be remembered, poets necessarily profit from the deaths they set out to mourn.