The moods of the elegy in Greek, Latin and English poetry

Abstract

"If elegy be defined as a song of mourning, an attempt to trace fits history would be a difficult task and perhaps an man must have voiced arrow for the dead. In fact, there is no ancient literature free from some form of the dirge and the lament. The subject of this study, however, is not the sorrow-songs of all mankind, but the elegy, named and developed by the Greeks, given its own vehicle--the elegiac distich, broadened to cover many moods, taken over for the sensuous love-plaints of Rome, made teacher and preacher by the scholars of the Middle Ages, and reincarnate in modern English poetry; reincarnate, one may say, since the old name, elegy, with the old connotation, a song of mourning, has a definite place in our great literature."-Page 1