Elegy
From Encyclopædia
An elegy in classical
literature was any highly serious poem written in alternating dactylic hexameter and dactylic pentameter. In later periods, however, the genre was usually associated with the themes of mourning or death, as in Thomas GRAY's
Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard (1750), or Percy Bysshe SHELLEY's lament for Keats, Adonais (1821), and John MILTON's Lycidas (1637), the latter two works in the pastoral tradition originated by THEOCRITUS.Jane Colville BettsBibliography: Draper, John W., Funeral Elegy and the Rise of English Romanticism (1929; repr. 1967); Green, M., ed., The
Old English Elegies (1983); Pigman, C.W., III, Grief and English
Renaissance Elegy (1985); Sacks, P.M., The English Elegy (1985); Smith, Eric, By Mourning
tongues: Studies in English Elegy (1977); Veyne, P., Erotic Elegy, trans. by D. Pellauer (1988); West, Martin Litchfield, Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus (1974).
