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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!"
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. Afterward, Samuel Taylor Coleridge argued that the elegiac is the form "most natural to the reflective mind" and that it may be upon any subject, so long as it reflects on the poet himself.
Verses were divided into "feet" by ancient grammarians and poets, such as Ovid, who called the elegiac couplet "eleven-footed poetry" (Amores 1.30). This practice is followed by traditionalists among modern scholars, especially, perhaps, those who compose Latin verses.
The term also included epitaphs, sad and mournful songs, [4] and commemorative verses. [5] The Latin elegy of ancient Roman literature was most often erotic or mythological in nature. Because of its structural potential for rhetorical effects, the elegiac couplet was also used by both Greek and Roman poets for witty, humorous, and satirical ...
Hexameters also form part of elegiac poetry in both languages, the elegiac couplet being a dactylic hexameter line paired with a dactylic pentameter line. This form of verse was used for love poetry by Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid, for Ovid's letters from exile, and for many of the epigrams of Martial.
The collection of verses attributed to Theognis has no overall structure, being a continuous series of elegiac couplets featuring frequent, sudden changes in subject and theme, in which different people are addressed and even the speaker seems to change persona, voicing contradictory statements and, on a couple of occasions, even changing sex.
Agathyllus (Gr. Ἀγάθυλλος) elegiac poet from Arcadia, who is quoted by Dionysius of Halicarnassus in reference to the history of Aeneas and the foundation of Rome. Alcaeus of Mytilene (c. 620 BC – 6th century BC), lyric poet who supposedly invented the Alcaic verse
This exists in two forms; an early version in two books, and a later, revised version in four books. [9] The work comments on the first twenty chapters of Genesis and the first ten verses of the twenty-first chapter. [10] Commentary on the Prayer of Habakkuk. It is not known when Bede composed this commentary. [11]