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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 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.
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 ...
George Cusack notes: "The structure of Field Work divides the collection into three thematic units, the first beginning with "Oysters," the first poem in the collection and continuing through "Elegy," the second beginning and ending with "The Glanmore Sonnets," which fall directly in the center of the collection, and the third beginning with ...
Astrophel: A Pastorall Elegy upon the Death of the Most Noble and Valorous Knight, Sir Philip Sidney is a poem by the English poet Edmund Spenser. [1] It is Spenser's tribute to the memory of Sir Philip Sidney , who had died in 1586, and was dedicated "To the most beautiful and vertuous Ladie, the Countesse of Essex", Frances Walsingham ...
Elegy XIX: To His Mistress Going to Bed", originally spelled "To His Mistris Going to Bed", is a poem written by the metaphysical poet John Donne. The elegy was refused a licence for publishing in Donne's posthumous collection Poems in 1633, but was printed in an anthology, The Harmony of the Muses , in 1654. [ 1 ]
"The Scholar-Gipsy" (1853) is a poem by Matthew Arnold, based on a 17th-century Oxford story found in Joseph Glanvill's The Vanity of Dogmatizing (1661, etc.). It has often been called one of the best and most popular of Arnold's poems, [ 1 ] and is also familiar to music-lovers through Ralph Vaughan Williams ' choral work An Oxford Elegy ...