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An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
[143] In 1968, Herbert Starr pointed out that the poem was "frequently referred to, with some truth, as the best known poem in the English language." [144] During the 1970s, some critics pointed out how the lines of the poems were memorable and popular while others emphasised the poem's place in the greater tradition of English poetry. W. K.
However, in 1751, Thomas Gray wrote "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard". That poem inspired numerous imitators, and soon both the revived Pindaric ode and "elegy" were commonplace. Gray used the term elegy for a poem of solitude and mourning, and not just for funereal verse. He also freed the elegy from the classical elegiac meter.
Hymn: a poem praising God or the divine (often sung). Lament: any poem expressing deep grief, usually at a death or some other loss. Dirge; Elegy: a poem of lament, praise, and consolation, usually formal and sustained, over the death of a particular person. Example: "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" by Thomas Gray. Light: whimsical poems ...
The pastoral elegy is a poem about both death and idyllic rural life. Often, the pastoral elegy features shepherds. The genre is actually a subgroup of pastoral poetry, as the elegy takes the pastoral elements and relates them to expressing grief at a loss. This form of poetry has several key features, including the invocation of the Muse ...
In 1751, Thomas Gray published "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", composed in the heroic stanza.Written in iambic pentameter, the poem followed the same metrical and structural patterns seen in Annus Mirabilis, but the use of the poetic form in an elegy gave it the title of the "elegiac decasyllabic quatrain". [3]
Any poem written in elegiac couplets; Elegies by Propertius (ca. 50-15 BC) Elegy, a 1586 poem by Chidiock Tichborne "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", a 1751 poem by Thomas Gray; Elegy, the opening poem in Leonard Cohen’s first collection Let Us Compare Mythologies from 1956.
There were two other accompanying poems, the "Elegy to the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady" and the original version of the "Ode on St Cecilia's Day". Such was the poem's popularity that it was reissued in 1720 along with the retitled "Verses to the memory of an unfortunate lady'" and several other elegiac poems by different authors.