The dominant form for all subjective poetry was the epigram, which was employed in all its variations from playful trifles to long elegiac and narrative poems.
Even after an age of reflection had begun, elegiac poetry, the first offshoot of epic, was, with iambic verse, the vehicle of much which among other races would have been committed to prose.
The forms of verse created by this need were theElegiac and the Iambic.
And among the Ionians arose elegiac poetry, the first variation on the epic type.
The early elegiac poetry of Greece was by no means confined to mourning for the dead.
Elegiac and iambic poetry both belong to the borderland between epic and lyric.
The lyric poetry of early Greece may be regarded as the final form of that effort at self-expression which in the elegiac and iambic is still incomplete.
The elegiac metre is, in form, a simple variation on the epic metre, obtained by docking the second of two hexameters so as to make it a verse of five feet or measures.
Hence the dialect of the Ionian epic poets would be adopted with more or less thoroughness even by epic or elegiac poets who were not Ionians.
But these two forms of poetry, both Ionian, the elegiac and the iambic, belong essentially to the same stage of the literature.
Then, as the individual life became more and more elegiac and iambic poetry had become the social expression of that life in all its varied interests and feelings.
As we see in the case of Solon, iambic verse could serve for the expression of that deeper thought, that more inward self-communing, for which the elegiacform would have been inappropriate.
But the poetical capabilities of the elegiaccouplet are of a wholly different kind from those of heroic verse.
Except the fifth elegy, which is tainted with immodesty, the others, particularly the first, are highly beautiful, and may be placed in competition with any other productions of the elegiac kind.
To this species of poetry Tibullus restricted his application, by which he cultivated that simplicity and tenderness, and agreeable ease of sentiment, which constitute the characteristic perfections of the elegiac muse.
Of all the Latin elegiac poets, Propertius has the justest claim to purity of thought and expression.
For as yet, even in the nominally or intentionally tragic and historic work of the first period, we descry always and everywhere and still preponderant the lyric element, the fantastic element, or even the elegiac element.
What is due to him, and to him alone, is the honour of having embroidered on the naked old canvas of comic action those flowers of elegiac beauty which vivify and diversify the scene of Plautus as reproduced by the art of Shakespeare.
The language has put off its foreign decorations of lyric and elegiac ornament; it has found already its infinite gain in the loss of those sweet superfluous graces which encumbered the march and enchained the utterance of its childhood.
And common to them all is a certain rush of full thought and joyous power, which is again a characteristic of youthful work, and is unlike the elegiac tenderness and pathos of David's later hymns.
So that his paragon also will one day see the light also, an elegiac of a different kind from Tennyson's; as far apart indeed as Cromwell and Hallam.
Lycidas is the utmost length an elegiac should reach.
Don't you think the world wants other notes than elegiac now?
Elegiac Stanzas on the Death of Sir Peter Parker, Bart.
Reference to Ossian in the paragraph on Elegiac Poetry in Schiller's essay Die sentimentalischen Dichter.
Though he could praise the gew-gaws and tinsel of Moore's mock Orientalism, he openly despised the limpidity of Lamartine's elegiac verse and the rhythmic illuminated thunder of Victor Hugo.
Later he was the elegiac Satan, the author of L'Imitation de N.
His literary fame rests upon theelegiac poem in which he described his journey from Rome to Gaul in 416 A.
The leading elegiac poets were Propertius, Tibullus and Ovid (43 B.
Hesiod with his poem on the life of man leads the way; and the writers of moral sentences in elegiac verse, among whom Solon and Theognis occupy the first place, follow.
Inscribed with an elegiac inscription of four lines of which only the terminations remain.
An elegiac tone pervades all our old national melodies, and, generally speaking, all that is of significance in our history; for it rises from the very bottom of the nation's heart.
Elegiac Stanzas suggested by a picture of Peele Castle in a storm.
It is only the disillusioned romanticist, however, who assumes this elegiac tone.
The thought is thin, the expression neat, though scarcely as pointed as we might expect from such an author, while the metre is graceful: the treatment of the elegiac is freer than that of Ovid, but pleasing and melodious.
More passionate and more convincing is the elegiac poem celebrating the poet's return to the scene of former happiness: o litus vita mihi dulcius, o mare!
Later, when returning from my military service, I was weather-bound in the island of Icaria, and wrote elegiac poems in Latin about that island and the sea, which bears the same name.
He continues: 'I then turned my attention to expressing the same thoughts in elegiac verse; I rattled these off at equal speed, and wrote some additional lines, being beguiled into doing so by the fluency with which I wrote the metre.
Elegiac graces, "I beg that gentlemen may take their places!
Eternity shall raise her funeral-pile In the vast dungeon of the extinguished sky, And, clothed in dim barbaric splendour, smile, And murmur shouts of elegiac joy.
Tyburn to him was as a field of glory, Where he must stoop to death his head sublime, Hymned in full many an elegiac rhyme.
From the shadow and grimness and elegiac pathos of Old English poetry we come suddenly into the light and color and gayety of Southern France.
The Latin poem, like its Greek original, is in elegiac verse, and is supposed to be spoken by the constellation called Coma Berenices.
Indeed, in all his verses, whether elegiac or heroic, we perceive his imitation of the Greeks, and it must be admitted that he has drawn from them his choicest stores.
Matters were in this state in the age of Mimnermus, who was contemporary with Solon, and was the most celebrated elegiac poet of the Greeks.
Callimachus was esteemed by all antiquity as the finest elegiacpoet of Greece, or at least as next in merit to Mimnermus.
None of the remaining poems of Catullus, though written in elegiac verse, are at all of the description to which we now give the name of elegy.
It is now thirty-six years since my first volume of miscellaneous verse, lyrical and dramatic and elegiac and generally heterogeneous, had as quaint a reception and as singular a fortune as I have ever heard or read of.
Those terrible cartoons of Leech will keep coming before our eyes as we read the bland elegiac stanzas in which Punch made amends for ten years of scarifying ridicule:-- It was too soon to die.
