From: "Peter Riley" <[log in to unmask]>
> 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. Most lamentational
> elegies were on public figures -- Jonson's two were exceptional, and
> actually I don't think he would have called them elegies -- an elegy was
> defined as a serious extended poem in heroic couplets on any subject.
At the time that Jonson was writing, the primary sense of an Elegy would be
an erotic lyric poem (cf. Ovid's Amores, translated by Marlowe as Ovid's
Elegies, and Donne's Elegies, Songs, and Sonets, etc., and indeed some poems
associated specifically with Jonson which are called "elegies"). Calling a
poem of lamentation an elegy only appears later.
That aside, poems of male emotion about children are, as Mark rightly points
out, rare at this period -- one of the few other examples is Macduff's
lament over his dead children in _Macbeth_.
Anne Bradstreet in the 1680s (have I the right decade?) is pertinent here.
Also the original version ("A Letter") of Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode",
which is personal, echt-domestic, and elegaic (in parts) though not formally
an elegy in most senses of the word. (Other than being inter alia a lament
over Coleridge's lost early promise, in contrast to his luckier mate
Wordsworth.)
K, back to stinkpots.
Robin
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> They were short poems on personal subjects out of the classical
> epigrammatical traditions.
>
> That you're not allowed to write such poems any more is, of course, one
> of the dogmas of the advanced party (dealt with theoretically in sermons
> about the position of the self in the text).
>
> P
>
>
>
> On 8 Sep 2010, at 16:31, Robin Hamilton wrote:
>
> From: Mark Weiss
>
> <<
> But surely you are aware that Jonson's elegy for his son is unique in his
> oeuvre.
>>>
>
> What about "On My First Daughter", Mark (which is, I think, the earlier
> of the two, and features a lift from The Greek Anthology for the punch
> line)?
>
> Robin
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