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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 ...
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.
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 ...
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 ...
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 ]
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.
Moving beyond the elegy lamenting a single death, their purpose was rarely sensationalist. As the century progressed, "graveyard" poetry increasingly expressed a feeling for the " sublime " and uncanny, and an antiquarian interest in ancient English poetic forms and folk poetry.
Alfred Cellier: "In 1883, Cellier's setting of Gray's Elegy, in the form of a cantata, was produced at the Leeds music festival." William Thomas Beckford: art collector who purchased "William Blake's drawings for Gray's Elegy" (this would be one of several examples of famous illustrated editions of the Elegy)