Additional Notes and Links on the Elegy

Poetic Form, Elegy, and Duende:

The elegy began as an ancient Greek metrical form and is traditionally written in response to the death of a person or group. Though similar in function, the elegy is distinct from the epitaph, ode, and eulogy: the epitaph is very brief; the ode solely exalts; and the eulogy is most often written in formal prose.

The elements of a traditional elegy mirror three stages of loss. First, there is a lament, where the speaker expresses grief and sorrow, then praise and admiration of the idealized dead, and finally consolation and solace. These three stages can be seen in W. H. Auden’s classic "In Memory of W. B. Yeats" .

Other well-known elegies include "Fugue of Death" by Paul Celan, written for victims of the Holocaust, and "O Captain! My Captain!" by Walt Whitman, written for President Abraham Lincoln.

For Lorca's essay on Duende, which constitutes a use of elegiac tone to underscore the 'song' of lyric, see the inclusion of this essay in our course reader, or find an online version here.

Some of the images Lorca evokes in the essay on Duende are Descartes' Nude Descending a Staircase, Rousseau's Apollinaire and His Muse, the work of Goya (which is interesting considering his own descent into the 'grays' Lorca speaks of from a bright and optimistic palette in earlier work such as La Vendimia), St. John of the Cross (here, Dali's depiction), the images as well as the spirit of Flamenco, English paintings of roses (most likely 19th century), the work of El Greco, the work of Antonello da Messina, the work of Masolino da Panicale, and the work of Filippo Lippi.

Many modern elegies have been written not out of a sense of personal grief, but rather a broad feeling of loss and metaphysical sadness. A famous example is the mournful series of ten poems in Duino Elegies, by German poet Rainer Maria Rilke. As Rilke says in the First Elegy:

For beauty is nothing but / the beginning of terror, which we are still just able to endure

Other works that can be considered elegiac in the broader sense are James Merrill’s monumental The Changing Light at Sandover, Robert Lowell’s "For the Union Dead," Seamus Heaney’s The Haw Lantern, and the work of Czeslaw Milosz, which often laments the modern cruelties he witnessed in Europe.

Elegy also very often crosses over into the Eros poem, the Love poem, and vice versa. We'll discuss some of these instances in class.