On 8 Sep 2010, at 17:09, Peter Riley wrote:
> Surely what's happened is a shift in the definition of "elegy" from
> a form to an emotion?
> And maybe also from an occasion to a personal event
Yes. I need to reemphasize that I was not just talking about a poem
having a 'subject' (e.g. the death of a parent), but about the ways in
which the subject of the poem becomes its primary value. And Peter is
right, one of the ways in which this reversal happens is through, in
this case, the implied 'emotion'.
So many mainstream poems are just a series of prompts to various
expected 'shared' emotions etc. If I was in a cynical mood (heaven
help me) I might say that a lot of the 'best' mainstream poetry of
this sort is simply that which manages to cloak these prompts better
than others but I'm not in a cynical mood so I won't say that.
Tim A.
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