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This chapter focuses on the benchmark metre in ancient poetry, the heroic hexameter. Three poetic forms embodying a contradiction of the epic ethos embodied by the hexameter are considered: saturnians, satirical hexameters, and elegiacs. Saturnians, the celebratory medium displaced by hexameters by Ennius, are probed for their capacity to convey resistance to the hellenization represented by hexameters, and similar implications attach to Lucilius' decision to adopt the hexameter as the default form for satire, but a hexameter which is a travesty of the magnificent vehicle of epic: later satirists offer interesting twists to this combative relationship with their own form. Finally, elegy has an ambivalent relationship with epic hard-wired into it by the uneasy combination of a dactylic hexameter and pentameter in the elegiac couplet, and poetry by a range of elegiac poets is used to show the creative potential of this metrical combination.

This chapter offers an explication of the feast in honour of Liber (F. 3. 713-90) in the light of a) the interplay of Greek myth and Roman cult; b) the mixing of presentational modes (didactic, hymnic, narrative, aetiological); c) generic self-consciousness (how Ovid meets the challenge of narrative in the elegiac meter); d) how Ovid imagines the details of the festival against the background of what we know of the Liberalia from elsewhere (the inscribed calendars, Varro, Macrobius, Augustine, and others).

This chapter argues that T. S. Eliot's poetry is illuminated by studying him in terms of a ‘counter-Romanticism’, which he discerns in Baudelaire and enacts in a variety of ways in his poems; it also attends to the Romantic ground of his beginnings as a poet. The intention is not neatly to re-package the poet, but to find appropriate ways of describing, evoking, and valuing the poetry. It helps, for example, in thinking about the achievement of ‘What the Thunder said’ to set it in relation to the apocalyptic ambitions of major Romantic poems. The first section of the chapter looks at early poems collected in Inventions of the March Hare, arguing that their questioning mode and idiom have much in common with, and can in places be read as elegiac about, the Romantic. The second section argues that The Waste Land can be read as a ‘counter-Romantic’ poem. The third section explores how Eliot continues to work at rewarding cross purposes so far as Romantic poetry is concerned; it examines, among other things, the links between Eliot's ‘moments’ and Wordsworth's ‘spots of time’, and between his and the Romantics' interest in the present-tense thisness of writing.

This chapter grapples with the place of blackness in Lee's ambitious first novel—both the book's relationships to African American precursors and its handling of African American characters—so as to illuminate the novel's ambivalent interethnic imaginary, its placement of protagonist Henry Park amidst the conflicting imperatives and attractions of whiteness, Koreanness, blackness, and the heterogeneous, diasporic New York City crowd. The novel casts a conflicted, even elegiac gaze at the multiethnic ideal it cherishes, and the odd distance it maintains from the black tradition it also honors is a grieving, melancholic one. Affiliations impossible in the realist plot are vividly inscribed in Lee's invocations of both Whitman and black precursors Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison. Beyond Asian, black, and white, the sublime and dangerous interethnic crowd offers a charged imaginative alternative.

This chapter focuses on American composer Rodney Lister’s Songs to Harvest (2006). As shown in this attractive cycle, Lister has a distinctive and fascinating way of writing for voice and piano. The voice projects succinct, shapely phrases, while linear piano parts weave a tapestry of sinuous counterpoint, frequently in two parts only, often with three-against-two rhythms. When the voice stops, the piano continues, its luminous texture ebbing and flowing. Ingeniously, it seems to give a subliminal commentary as well as an irresistible propulsion to the music. The prime test of the songsmith is to set words so that they can be heard easily, and Lister passes this with flying colours. A predominantly medium range guarantees comfortable articulation—the highest note occurs only once, fleetingly. The cohesive musical idiom is discreetly contemporary, disciplined, and carefully modulated. Pitching should be relatively unproblematic—there is a good deal of doubling with the piano, and plenty of time to plot each interval cleanly.

This book examines Native American elegiac expression across time and space. Focusing on the contiguous United States and Alaska, it considers how the work of mourning for traditional Native Americans is performed by citing as examples the Iroquois Condolence Council and the Tlingit koo.'eex' (roughly, “potlatch”). It argues that it is only in response to exile that “melancholic mourning” becomes necessary that the People might live, as evidenced by some of the nineteenth-century Ghost Dance songs. It shows that Native American writers from the nineteenth century to the present often express a deep sense of exilic loss in their work, whether it is land loss and ceremonial loss, language loss, culture loss, or loss of names. It also highlights some of the differences between traditional Native elegiac performance and Western elegy.

This chapter examines a variety of Native American oral performances, beginning with the Condolence Rites of the Iroquois. The Rites of Condolence, performed upon the death of one of the fifty chiefs of the Iroquois League, include chants rehearsing the history of the League and conclude with the appointment of a replacement for the deceased chief. The chapter also considers the Tlingit koo.'eex' and goes on to discuss a number of more informal, occasional oral performances responding to loss, from several different Native nations. Finally, it explores songs of the religious resistance movement known as the Ghost Dance. The Ghost Dance songs constitute the first major genre of oral, elegiac expression in response to exile, but also serve as symbolic attempts at restoration.

This chapter examines a variety of written expressions that may be read in the context of elegy and are attributed to Native American authors. It begins by considering Black Hawk's autobiography Life, published in 1833 by John Barton Patterson. Life was long read as elegiac in the Western sense, mourning what was irrevocably gone, and Black Hawk's narration is more nearly elegiac in the Native American sense; it is not Western mourning but indigenous “melancholic mourning” of a particularly creative kind. The chapter also analyzes Black Elk Speaks (1932), Reverend William Apess's Eulogy on King Philip (1836), and the elegiac poetry of Jane Johnston Schoolcraft, John Rollin Ridge, and others.

This chapter examines elegy in the “Native American Renaissance” and after, starting with the elegiac autobiographical text The Way to Rainy Mountain (1969) by N. Scott Momaday and “Prologue” from Linda Hogan's novel Solar Storms (1995). It also considers Gerald Vizenor prose elegy for a red squirrel, along with elegiac work attributed to various Native American poets such as Sherman Alexie, Jim Barnes, Kimberly Blaeser, Jimmie Durham, Lee Francis, Lance Henson, Maurice Kenny, Adrian Louis, Simon Ortiz, Carter Revard, and Ralph Salisbury. Many of these elegiac poems engage in various forms of melancholic mourning by telling the stories, reciting the names, and remembering those who have died, so that the People might live.

Some of the so-called Homeric Hymns, dating from the seventh century bc, provide evidence of poetic performance at festivals in Greece. Alongside the sung hexameter epics, two other verse traditions appear to have been recited without music: iambics and elegiacs, both of which were used in public performances. We hear of a new kind of recited performance in the sixth century, that of the rhapsode, the fullest account of which (admittedly from a hostile perspective) is that given by Plato in the Ion. This chapter discusses the figure of the rhapsode, and the significance of a performance tradition in which a fixed text is used, perhaps with the aid of a written script. The chapter ends with a consideration of Plato’s hostility to poetry and Aristotle’s response to his arguments.

This chapter offers a comprehensive inquiry into photography's place in Joseph Brodsky's oeuvre and connects the poet's thinking about photography with his process of poetic creation. Through a close reading of photographic motifs in selected poems and essays, the chapter shows that photographs for this poet have a particular elegiac quality that works in multiple temporal frames. For Brodsky, photo-poetic writing offers simultaneous access to past, present, and future temporalities; photography represents an essential aesthetic instrument for his writings about mortality, memory, and exile. The chapter also permits us a firmer grasp on how Brodsky understands the nature of texts by exploring his creative dialogue with photography. From examining the contours of Brodsky's photographic imagination, the chapter allows us to learn what poetry is capable of as a verbal, language-based form, in contrast with the visual nature of the photographic medium.

Oliver Stone’s Platoon (1986) introduced a new sort of movie music resounding across Hollywood war films for the last thirty years: the elegiac register. Composer Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, heard repeatedly in Platoon, proves the musical source for this slow, strings-only, contrapuntal, harmonious, sad, and mournful music. This chapter describes this new sort of movie music in musical terms and identifies moments in later films when composers model their original scores directly on Barber’s Adagio. Film form often follows musical form when elegiac music is used. Multiple scenes from combat films are described visually and sonically, showing how the elegiac register has been put to varied ends: to foster reflection in combat film audiences, to put a pause on the action, and, most significantly, to frame the repeated images of dead and injured American soldiers’ bodies which lie at the heart of the cultural work done by serious war films in the post-Vietnam era.

This paper aims to detect some exceptions to the commonly accepted idea that elegy was an exclusively monodic genre. Pausanias (4.16.6) states that a chorus of Messenian women celebrated Aristomenes’ victory against the Spartans with an elegiac couplet and this is not an isolated case. In the Laconian area the festival of the Gymnopaidia may have played an important role in the widespread use of choral elegies, thanks to some well-known aulodes and elegiac poets of the archaic age, such as Sacadas and Polymnestus. Choruses may also have been involved in the re-performance of sympotic elegies. Theognis (238–43) imagines that his song will be sung in the symposia by young men at the sound of the pipes, whereas Plato (Tim. 21b) attests that Solons’ elegies were sung by boys at the Athenian festival of the Apatouria.

The death of Wordsworth’s sailor brother, John, in February of 1805 brought forth the writing of “Distressful Gift.” Written in memory of his brother, it contained the agreement that Wordsworth had with his brother: that John would perform the task of earning a living for them while Wordsworth would do something for the world through his language and poetry. This type of elegiac address possibly finds it precursor in Milton’s “Lycidas.” Derrida’s The Work of Mourning (2001) also echoes this unheard address to the dead. In Derrida’s case, however, the elegies are replies and after-thoughts, conversations with the dead. Where Freud speaks of the ego detaching itself in order for life to move on, Derrida insists that we continue to converse with the dead through the hearing of their voices, the reading of their books, and the seeing of their faces.

This chapter explores the arrangement of the poems in the Book of Catullus, and analyses the importance of the first and last poems in the anthology. It shows that Catullus ordered his 116 poems into three groups: poems one to sixty are poems in a variety of metres; poems sixty-one to sixty-eight are the long poems; and poems sixty-nine to one hundred and sixteen are poems with elegiac couplets. The chapter explains that the first poem serves as both a preface and a dedication, addressed to Cornelius Nepos, Catullus' contemporary. It is said that the final poem serves as a closure to the reader, as if acting like a poet's signature at the end of a piece.

The letters in Part I show Beaumont cultivating a dynamic of critical exchange with Wordsworth. Beaumont’s love of the theatre serves as a pathway to a broader discussion of the arts: they discuss the paintings of David Wilkie and Henry Edridge as well as the poetry of Robert Southey and Walter Scott. Following the death of John Wordsworth, letters concerning ‘Character of the Happy Warrior’ and ‘Elegiac Stanzas’ (touching on issues including politics, fortitude, hope and grief) demonstrate the depth and complexity of the developing friendship between Beaumont and Wordsworth. Sir George introduces Wordsworth to the literary heritage of his Coleorton estate, begins to involve him in decisions about the landscaping of the grounds, and invites him to design a Winter Garden.

Chapter 6 examines the handbills that were passed around on the streets and the notices that were posted up in Scottish communities during the early modern period. In particular, it looks at government proclamations and civic ordinances, topical publications and newssheets, elegiac poetry and satirical squibs, commercial advertisements and playbills, together with other ephemeral items printed on a single sheet. It indicates the ways in which public places in Scotland would have been filled with a variety of flyers and posters that made up the textual environment of everyday life. The fragile nature of such material has ensured its limited survival and made its contemporary significance easy to overlook, but it made a fundamental contribution to the cultural ambience of the urban Lowlands in these centuries.

The marks left by readers in their personal copies of Charlotte Smith’s Elegiac Sonnets provide traces of how manuscript engages print, and readers materially engage writers, in the Romantic period. Surveying 152 copies of Elegiac Sonnets and other contemporary sonnet collections by Bowles, Robinson, and Seward, this essay considers how marginalia challenges us to reconsider how readers used books—and how books might use their readers—in soliciting and forging affective relationships through print. We chronicle Smith’s careful recollecting and reframing of her own poetry in printed editions, a practice which seems to have licensed readers in turn to change how they responded to her verse. Why did Smith’s readers mark, interleave, or otherwise thicken their copies more often and with greater urgency than the readers of other late eighteenth-century sonneteers, particularly as the Elegiac Sonnets grew? Tracing these various annotations, from the most conventional to the most transgressive, heightens our historical sense of the dynamism of Smith’s publishing practice and illuminates the sentimental and aesthetic bonds she formed with readers. It also, we argue, exposes something more radical: a blurring of lines between persona and poet, author and reader, and between book-writer and book-owner.