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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 ...
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.
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!"
For example, the Oxford English Dictionary defines elegy (in the poetic sense) as a poem either composed in the elegiac metre of Greek and Roman lyric poets, expressing "personal sentiments on a range of subjects, including epigrams, laments, [and] love", or "a poem in another language based on or influenced by this" [20] – hence, from this ...
Some say the best known elegy in English is "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," by Thomas Gray, a well-known English poet. This elegy discusses the actual condition of death, not just the death of a single individual. John Milton’s "Lycidas," considered the most famous pastoral elegy, mourns the death of the poet’s good friend Edward King.
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.
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Similar terms include "dirge", "coronach", "lament" and "elegy". The Epitaphios Threnos is the lamentation chanted in the Eastern Orthodox Church on Holy Saturday. John Dryden commemorated the death of Charles II of England in the long poem Threnodia Augustalis, and Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote a "Threnody" in memory of his son. [3]