The Elegy in Literary Tradition: A Chronology
The elegy that Whitman and Dickinson knew as a major poetic form is one with a rich history, generally thought to have originated in both the Greek and Roman myths of Orpheus and Eurydice. The texts in Elegiac Traditions trace the elegy from its early origins through the mid-nineteenth century.The examples presented here show the various functions of the elegy:
- to honor a hero who died in a war
- to lament the passing of a way of life or a specific individual
- to offer praise and assess the value of the departed
- to provide consolation for those who are left behind
- to lament dead poets
- to formulate new ambitions and to reflect on poetic genealogies
The texts in Whitman and the Elegiac Tradition, Dickinson and the Elegiac Tradition, and the Elegy and the Civil War illustrate how the two poets and several of their contemporaries drew upon the genre of the elegy as they attempted to come to terms, as poets and as human beings, with death and dying during the Civil War.
Ancient Literary Origins of the Elegy:
Homer, selection from The Iliad (eighth century, B.C.)
Sappho (c. 630 BC)
Early Elegiac Poems:
selection from Beowulf (c. 700-750)
"The Wanderer" (c. 975)Middle English and the Renaissance Elegies:
Geoffrey Chaucer, selection from The Book of the Dutchess (c. 1368)
Sir Philip Sidney, selection from Old Arcadia (1580)The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries:
John Milton, selection from “Lycidas” (1637)
Anne Bradstreet, "An Elegie upon Sir Philip Sidney" (1638)
Thomas Gray, selection from “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1751)
Phillis Wheatley, selection from "On the Death of the Rev. Mr. George Whitefield" (1770)Nineteenth-Century Elegies:
Percy Bysshe Shelley, selection from "Adonais: An Elegy on the Death of John Keats" (1821)
Lydia Sigourney, selection from "Funeral of Mazeen: The Last of the Royal Line of the Mohegan Nation" (1841)
Ralph Waldo Emerson, selection from "Threnody" (1846)
Alfred, Lord Tennyson, selection from “In Memoriam A.H.H." (1850)
Whitman and the Elegiac Tradition
"O Captain! My Captain" (1865)
"When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'D" (1865-66)
"Murder of President Lincoln" (1875-76)
selections from “The Death of Abraham Lincoln,” (1879)
Dickinson and the Elegiac Tradition
"That after Horror - that 'twas us -" (FP#243, c. 1861-62, JP#286)
Letters from Dickinson to Frances and Louise Norcross (1861-62)
Letters from Dickinson to Thomas Wentworth Higginson (1863-64)
"The Soul unto itself" (OMC#86, mid-1860s; FP#579; JP#683)
"Tis good - the looking back on Grief -" (FP#472, late 1862; JP#660)
"As imperceptively as Grief" (FP#935, early 1865; JP#1540)
"When I was small a Woman died -" (FP#518, spring 1863; JP#596)
"It feels a shame to be alive" (FP#524, spring 1863; JP#444)
Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Chiefly about War Matters," (1862)
Herman Melville, “The Martyr” (1865)
Jones Very Hymn, Sung at the Eulogy on Abraham Lincoln (1865)
William Cullen Bryant, "The Death of Lincoln" (???)
Christopher Pearce Cranch, "The Martyr"
Thomas Bailey Aldrich, "A Great Man’s Death" (1865)
