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Updated: June 14, 2025
We may rely upon it that we shall not improve upon the classification adopted by the Greeks for kinds of poetry; that their categories of epic, dramatic, lyric, and so forth, have a natural propriety, and should be adhered to. It may sometimes seem doubtful to which of two categories a poem belongs; whether this or that poem is to be called, for instance, narrative or lyric, lyric or elegiac.
His genius was purely elegiac in tone, and he relied entirely for the effect which he intended to produce upon the luscious beauty of his melodies, into which, it must be admitted, the great singers of his time contrived to infuse a surprising amount of dramatic force.
The founder of this school was Xenophanes, born in Colophon, an Ionian city of Asia Minor, from which, being expelled, he wandered over Sicily as a rhapsodist or minstrel, reciting his elegiac poetry on the loftiest truths; and at last came to Elea, about the year 536, where he settled.
When the poet opposes nature to art, and the ideal to the real, so that nature and the ideal form the principal object of his pictures, and that the pleasure we take in them is the dominant impression, I call him an elegiac poet. In this kind, as well as in satire, I distinguish two classes.
He was but eight years old, when, in 1591, he wrote some elegiac verses, very pretty for that age: afterwards he thought them not good enough to publish. M. le Clerc informs us, that he had seen a copy of them in the possession of a very able man, who purposed to write the life of Grotius. Nothing contributed more to his amazing progress, than the excellent education he received.
England as well as Italy furnished a congenial soil for allegory in the thirteenth century. In his Poetria, John of Garland explains allegorically an "elegiac, bucolic, ethic, love poem" which he quotes. "Under the guise of the nymph," he says, "is figured forth the flesh; under that of the corrupt youth, the world or the devil; under that of the friend, reason."
"It is signed 'Loving Father and 3 Sisters. But the actual authorship rests with the long gentleman in black whom you see leaning on the park fence yonder. His name is Bartholomew Storrs and he is the elegiac or mortuary or memorial laureate of Our Square." This was said with intent to mortify the soul of my new acquaintance in revenge for his previous display of erudition.
These, he says, and not the long-abandoned hope of Medicean protection, were the baits which really attracted him, if he were again asked to go as Ferrarese ambassador to Rome. But the ruins within and outside Rome awakened not only archaeological zeal and patriotic enthusiasm, but an elegiac of sentimental melancholy. In Petrarch and Boccaccio we find touches of this feeling.
Of these last the weightiest is the one at first called simply 'Elegy', and later 'The Walk'. Just as Goethe had used the elegiac meter for his reminiscences of Rome, so Schiller employs it for his impressions of such small travel as fate permitted him, a summertime walk in field or forest.
Only they strove, as it were, to preserve the most general elemental mood of natural beauty, while we strain ourselves in depicting individual changeable moods. Do we not actually see at present stage-scenery painted like sentimental mood-pictures, trees in the foreground, for example, on whose deformed greenish-brown foliage an elegiac late-autumnal tinge rests?
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