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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 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!"
Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person. [1] The term for both modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature , the Greek lyric , which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on an instrument known as ...
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 Elegy may almost be looked upon as the typical piece of English verse, our poem of poems; not that it is the most brilliant or original or profound lyric in our language, but because it combines in more balanced perfection than any other all the qualities that go to the production of a fine poetical effect." [130]
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 ...
According to the critic Carl Woodring, "She Dwelt" can also be read as an elegy. He views the poem and the Lucy series in general as elegiac "in the sense of sober meditation on death or a subject related to death", and that they have "the economy and the general air of epitaphs in the Greek Anthology ... if all elegies are mitigations of death, the Lucy poems are also meditations on simple ...
Rather, the thematic similarity of the poem to The Wife's Lament, also found in the Exeter Book, has caused most modern scholars to place it, along with the Wife's Lament, solidly within the genre of the Frauenlied, or woman's song and, more broadly, in that of the Old English elegy. These two poems are also used as examples of the female voice ...