“The art of losing isn’t hard to master,” Elizabeth Bishop tells us — and yet artistry can often seem the least appropriate response to the misery of loss. When pain is primitive and specific, as it is after the death of a loved one, then we don’t want an exquisite performance filled with grand abstractions. What we want is to go beyond art, beyond society and beyond speech itself, as Lear does when he enters carrying the body of his daughter and crying, “Howl howl howl howl!” We want heaven’s vault to crack. We want the veil parted and the bone laid bare. This is what Tennyson meant when he wrote in Canto 54 of “In Memoriam,” his tribute to his friend Arthur Hallam, that his grief left him “no language but a cry.”