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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 ...
An elegy seeks, also, to "attempt to preserve the meaning of an individual's life as something of positive value when that life itself has ceased." [ 57 ] [ 58 ] A typical pastoral elegy contains several features, including "a procession of mourners, the decoration of a hearse or grave, a list of flowers, the changing of the seasons, and the ...
First page of Dodsley's illustrated edition of Gray's Elegy with illustration by Richard Bentley. Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is a poem by Thomas Gray, completed in 1750 and first published in 1751. [1] The poem's origins are unknown, but it was partly inspired by Gray's thoughts following the death of the poet Richard West in 1742.
An elegy is very old poetic form that serves as both a lament and a celebration. It might seem strange to write an elegy for a dog, but as many writers and poets have found, pets in general and ...
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 ...
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.
Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats, Author of Endymion, Hyperion, etc. (/ ˌ æ d oʊ ˈ n eɪ. ɪ s / ) is a pastoral elegy written by Percy Bysshe Shelley for John Keats in 1821, and widely regarded as one of Shelley's best and best-known works. [ 1 ]
Indeed, Gray's poem follows the style of the mid-century literary endeavour to write of "universal feelings." [30] Samuel Johnson also said of Gray that he spoke in "two languages". He spoke in the language of "public" and "private" and according to Johnson, he should have spoken more in his private language as he did in his "Elegy" poem. [31]