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ELEGY 397 ( ); K. Strecker, “Leoninische Hexameter Und ELEGY 397 (); K. Strecker, “Leoninische Hexameter und speare, Two Gentlemen of Verona) can be recommended Pentameter in . Jahrhundert,” Neues Archiv für ältere to a would-be seducer. T is composite understanding deutsche Geschichtskunde (); C. M. Bowra, Early of the genre, however, is never fully worked out and Greek Elegists, d ed. (); P. F r i e d l ä n d e r , Epigram- gradually fades. mata: Greek Inscriptions in Verse from the Beginnings to T e most important cl. models for the later devel. of the Persian Wars ( ); M. Platnauer, Latin Elegiac Verse elegy are *pastoral: the lament for Daphnis (who died (); L. P. Wilkinson, Golden Latin Artistry ( ); of love) by T eocritus, the elegy for Adonis attributed T. G. Rosenmeyer, “Elegiac and Elegos,” California to Bion, the elegy on Bion attributed to Moschus, and Studies in Classical Antiquity (); D. Ross, Style another lament for Daphnis in the fi fth *eclogue of and Tradition in Catullus ( ); M. L. West, Studies in Virgil. All are stylized and mythic, with hints of ritual; Greek Elegy and Iambus ( ); A.W.H. Adkins, Poetic the fi rst three are punctuated by incantatory *refrains. Craft in the Early Greek Elegists ( ); R. M. Marina T e elegies on Daphnis are staged performances within Sáez, La métrica de los epigramas de Marcial (). an otherwise casual setting. Nonhuman elements of the T.V.F. BROGAN; A. T. COLE pastoral world are enlisted in the mourning: nymphs, satyrs, the landscape itself. In Virgil, the song of grief is E L E G I A C S T A N Z A , elegiac quatrain, heroic qua- paired with one celebrating the dead man’s apotheosis; train. In Eng., the iambic pentameter quatrain rhymed the poem is usually read as an *allegory on the death abab . While it had been frequently employed without and deifi cation of Julius Caesar. Virgil’s poem becomes elegiac feeling or intention by other poets, e.g., Shake- particularly infl uential and adaptable. In the th c., speare in his sonnets and John Dryden in his Annus Paschasius Radbertus composes an imitation in which Mirabilis, t h e t e r m elegiac stanza was apparently made the nuns Galathea and Phyllis sing of a deceased shep- popular by its use in T omas Gray’s “ Elegy Written herd monk as a fi gure for Christ. At the prompting in a Country Churchyard” (), though, in fact, the of humanism, Ren. poets experiment with the pastoral association of the *quatrain with *elegy in Eng. ap- elegy and use it for a range of personal, political, and pears at least as early as James Hammond’s Love Ele- symbolic reference. Few collections of pastorals in the gies ( ) and was employed “almost invariably” for Ren. are without at least one elegy, and there are im- elegiac verse for about a century thereafter (Bate)—cf. portant stand-alone examples, such as Clément Marot’s William Wordsworth’s “Elegiac Stanzas Suggested by “Eglogue” on the death of Louise of Savoy (). John Peele Castle.” Milton composes two full-fl edged pastoral elegies: Epi- ᭿ W. J. Bate, T e Stylistic Development of Keats (). taphium Damonis in Lat., on a close friend (), and T.V.F. BROGAN; S. F. FOGLE “Lycidas” in Eng., on a schoolmate (). T e latter is widely regarded as Milton’s fi rst major poetic achieve- E L E G Y ment and the most successful vernacular instance of the genre. It was, nevertheless, sharply criticized in the I. History next century by Samuel Johnson for its artifi ciality; he II. Criticism speaks for a growing disenchantment with the genre. I. History . In mod. usage, an elegy is a poem of loss or Major poets, however, can return to it in full dress: mourning. T e term is Gr., its initial signifi cance met- P. B. Shelley in “Adonais” () on the shockingly rical: elegeia designates a poem in elegiac *couplets. In early death of John Keats, W. B. Yeats in “Shepherd antiquity, the meter is used for a range of subjects and and Goatherd” () on an unnamed shepherd who styles, incl. the kind of combative, promiscuous love “died in the great war beyond the sea.” T e presence presented in the poetry of Propertius, Tibullus, and of the genre can also be felt in less-adorned poems, in Ovid. T e popularity and prestige of what is still called the general sense that the countryside is the right place Roman love elegy make elegy a loose synonym for “love for elegiac feeling (T omas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a poem” in early mod. usage, though the cl. exemplars Country Churchyard,” ) or in the arch affi rmation are not generally “elegiac” in what becomes the domi- of natural sympathy with which W. H. Auden opens nant sense of the term. T e meter, however, was also his elegy on Yeats (). popular for *epitaphs, both literal and literary; all the Pastoral, however, is only a specialized trad. within Roman elegists also wrote elegies in the mod. sense, and the wider fi eld of poetic treatments of death and loss. in antiquity, the metrical term also becomes a synonym Such poems (which may or may not call themselves for *“lament.” Neo-Lat. poets from the th-c. on com- elegies) show an immense diversity, within which fi li- pose new works in elegiac couplets, and attempts are ations can be complex. Some important examples are made to transfer the meter to the vernaculars. Among really sui generis ; among the few unforgettable Eng. the most successful is J. W. Goethe’s, incl. a collection poems of the fi rst decade of the th c. is John Skelton’s of Römische Elegien ( ), scandalously sensual love Philip Sparrow, , unpredictable lines on the death poems, defi antly unmournful. Some critics (such as of a young girl’s pet bird. T e object in question is usu- J. C. Scaliger in the th c.) try to theorize a common ally another person, often specifi cally identifi ed: an im- ground between Roman love elegy and lament for the portant public fi gure or someone with a close personal dead (both involve *complaints); the popularity of *Pe- connection to the poet, such as a spouse, lover, parent, trarchism in the Ren. strengthens a feeling that absence child, or friend. Elegies on other poets are particularly and frustration are central themes in *love poetry; common; elegies for oneself are at least as old as Ovid’s and along these lines, “dire-lamenting elegies” (Shake- exile poems. Elegies for groups or classes of people (esp. This content downloaded from 165.123.34.86 on Tue, 15 Dec 2015 00:20:12 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 398 ELEGY those killed in war) date back to the Greeks but be- acterize the genre; that its mode is primarily *lyric, come a particular feature of the th c. (such as Anna with certain characteristic generic markers (*apostro- Akhmatova’s Requiem ( , pub. ) on the “name- phe, exclamation, *pathetic fallacy, epideixis, pastoral less friends” lost in the Stalinist terror of –). topoi, *allusion, *epitaph); and that its indigenous Poems can present themselves as epitaphs or as contain- moods are sorrow, shock, rage, longing, melancholy, ing epitaphs, sometimes addressing a visitor to the cem- and resolution—often in quick succession. Most etery ( siste viator ). Even in times that value poetic artifi ce literary historians have understood elegy as closely at its most elaborate, poems of personal grief—such as linked to the hist., theory, and decorum of cultural Henry King’s “Exequy” on the dead wife he calls “his practices of mourning. Pigman’s Grief and Renaissance matchless never to be forgotten friend” ()—can be Elegy a n d S a c k s ’ s T e English Elegy are two particularly strikingly direct in their eff ect. In th-c. writing, the infl uential studies, both pub. in , that continue appetite for directness becomes conspicuous, at times to set questions and topics for later scholars. While brutal (“he’s dead / the old bastard”; W. C. Williams, studies vary in the extent of their embrace of psycho- “Death” []). It is, however, an equally famous re- analysis or cultural hist., they concur in describing the source of elegies to proceed by complicated indirection. elegy as, in Pigman’s phrase, “a process of mourning.” In Chaucer’s T e Book of the Duchess ( c a . ), occa- Pigman identifi es a shift in Reformation views and sioned by the death of his patron’s wife, the dreaming practices of mourning with consequences for elegy; narrator cannot acknowledge that occasion until the Sacks sees the conventions of the genre from Edmund last of the poem’s , lines, long after the reader has Spenser to Yeats as answerable to psychological needs. divined it. T e mourning in Keats’s ode “To Autumn” Later critics weigh in with some mix of social hist., () is almost entirely subliminal and inexplicit, but psychology, and aesthetic analysis. Ramazani registers strong enough to make three stanzas of seasonal descrip- a protest by mod. elegy against normative cultural tion one of the touchstone lyrics in the lang. models of mourning; Zeiger, Kennedy, and others Some important elegies are expansive in their reach. explore the importance of elegy as a resource for trau- In Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rock- matic collective grief over breast cancer, AIDS, and ing” (), a child (as in Philip Sparrow reacting to the events of September , ; Spargo explores the the death of a bird) hears from the sea a message of psychological dimension of the form with philosophi- “Death, death, death, death, death” that is also the start cal attention.
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