Elegy




Elegy, in Greek and Latin literature, any poem written in elegiacs (also called elegiac couplets), that is, in alternate lines of hexameter and pentameter. The ultimate derivation of the name is uncertain, but it was perhaps connected with a word for ‘flute’, an instrument which seems originally to have accompanied its recitation (compare LYRIC). In antiquity the elegiac metre was considered to be primarily the metre of lament, but it was used for a variety of poems, and the earliest lines we possess, written in Greece at the end of the eighth century BC, bear no resemblance to lament. Elegiac poetry was the medium for expressing personal sentiments (as distinct from narrative): for description, for exhortation to war or to virtue, for reflection on a variety of subjects, serious and frivolous, for epitaphs and laments, and for love-poems. The use of elegiacs for inscriptions to commemorate the dead seems to have become popular in the middle of the sixth century BC and persisted throughout antiquity; those attributed to Simonides are the most famous. Among the principal early elegiac poets of Greece were Tyrtaeus, Mimnermus, Solon, Phocylides, Callinus, and Theognis. Love poems in elegiacs are said to have been first written by Mimnermus; they may have been a development from the cheerful sympotic elegies such as were written by Archilochus. The Hellenistic poets in particular used this form for love poetry, and also introduced a number of metrical refinements.

The history of Latin elegy begins in the first century BC when it was developed at Rome under Greek influence chiefly as a medium for love poetry. The Romans gave elegy a new direction by using it for a cycle of short poems centred on the poet's relationship with a single mistress. Almost every individual feature of Latin love-elegy is derived from Greek models, but the whole effect is of something completely original. The principal Roman poets were Cornelius Gallus, whose work has not survived, Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid. Ovid also refined the already strict metrical rules for Latin elegiac still further, and extended the range of subjects to be treated in this metre. After Ovid, the metre was used chiefly for short occasional poems and for epigrams. Martial is the most famous practitioner of the epigram and he sometimes rivals Ovid in metrical virtuosity.

Only in comparatively modern times, since the sixteenth century, has the term elegy come to denote specifically a poem of lament for an individual or a poem of serious, meditative tone. Several famous elegies in English literature are written using the conventions of pastoral, one of the earliest being Edmund Spenser's Astrophel, on the death of Sir Philip Sidney (1586). The origin of the pastoral lament or elegy is to be found in Theocritus' first Idyll; this poem, however, being written in hexameters and not in elegiacs, is not, in classical terms, an elegy.


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