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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 ...
The elegiac couplet is presumed to be the oldest Greek form of epodic poetry (a form where a later verse is sung in response or comment to a previous one). Scholars, who even in the past did not know who created it, [3] theorize the form was originally used in Ionian dirges, with the name "elegy" derived from the Greek ε, λεγε ε, λεγε—"Woe, cry woe, cry!"
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 other examples of poetry such as Alfred Tennyson's "The Lady of Shalott", an elegiac tone can be used, where the author is praising someone in a sombre tone. J. R. R. Tolkien in his essay "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics" argues that Beowulf is a heroic elegy.
Holograph manuscript of Gray's "Stanzas Wrote in a Country Church-Yard". The poem most likely originated in the poetry that Gray composed in 1742. William Mason, in Memoirs, discussed his friend Gray and the origins of Elegy: "I am inclined to believe that the Elegy in a Country Church-yard was begun, if not concluded, at this time [August 1742] also: Though I am aware that as it stands at ...
It is a long poem, 206 lines in length (207 according to some sources), that is cited as a prominent example of the elegy form and of narrative poetry. [40] In its final form, published in 1881 and republished to the present, the poem is divided into sixteen sections referred to as cantos or strophes that range in length from 5 or 6 lines to as ...
Examples: "Barbara Allen" and "John Henry" Literary ballad: poems adapting the conventions of folk ballads, beginning in the Renaissance. Examples: “La Belle Dame sans Merci” by John Keats and “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe. Epic (or epos): an extended narrative poem, typically expressing heroic themes.
Ovid's Amores are firmly set in the genre of love elegy. The elegiac couplet was used first by the Greeks, originally for funeral epigrams, but it came to be associated with erotic poetry. [15] Love elegy as a genre was fashionable in Augustan times. [14] The term 'elegiac" refers to the meter of the poem.