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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.