Abstract
The rhetorical work of building a community of shared loss drags against elegists’ desire to individuate themselves as writers. Elegy holds exemplarity and tradition, the consolatory promise of the continuity of the same, in tension with the poet’s assertions of his or her particularity or difference. To evaluate the demands of tradition, this chapter will focus on the meaning of the term ’elegy’ and its derivation from epideictic and deliberative rhetoric. Elegy could also be understood as a particular metre, the elegiac distich. A brief discussion of the perceived faults of this metre in the early modern period will pave the way for a return to the subject of prosody in Chapter 6. As a genre, elegy is identified by its content: praise and lament. The forces shaping lament will be investigated in Chapter 2. Here, elegy’s commonalities of purpose and utility with epideictic reveal the social nature of praise, discussed in Section 1.2. Praise was perceived to improve the moral character of both writer and reader, orator and listener. This contributed to the placement of rhetoric at the centre of the early modern humanist curriculum. Section 1.3 scrutinizes a particular locus of elegiac production: the school and the university. These competitive learning environments also trained writers to consider occasional poetry as an opportunity for self-fashioning and display, Section 1.4 contends.
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Notes
John E. Clark, Élégie: The Fortunes of a Classical Genre in Sixteenth-Century France (The Hague and Paris: Mouton, 1975), pp. 8–9.
Rosalie L. Colie, ‘“AH in Peeces:” Problems of Interpretation in Donne’s Anniversary Poems’, Just So Much Honour, ed. Peter Amadeus Fiore (University Park, PA: Penn State UP, 1971), pp. 189–218 (194).
Alastair Fowler suggests that the blending of genres was influenced by the use of the silva form in the teaching of writing. ‘The Formation of Genres in the Renaissance and After’, New Literary History 34.2 (2003): 185–200 (186).
Henry Peacham, The Period of Mourning (1613), p. 17.
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see also Morton W. Bloomfield, ‘The Elegy and the Elegiac Mode: Praise and Alienation’ in Lewalski (1986), pp. 147–57.
Alastair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres and Modes (Oxford: Clarendon, 1982), p. 136.
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David Norbrook agrees that ‘The elegies in Jonsonus Virbius — and most of those in Iusta Edovardo King — indicate the growing hegemony of the closed couplet as a dominating metrical form.’ ‘The Politics of Milton’s Early Poetry’, John Milton, ed. Annabel Patterson (Harlow: Longman, 1992), p. 54.
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Ibid., p. 108; but compare The Underwood xviii, xix, xxii, xl and so on. On Jonson’s abandonment of Ovidian elegy, see David Riggs, Ben Jonson: A Life (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1989), p. 75.
These include O. B. Hardison, Jr., The Enduring Monument (Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1962)
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see also Thomas O. Sloane, Donne, Milton, and the End of Humanist Rhetoric (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA: U of California P, 1985), pp. 93–4, 130–44.
Here, I am following Gérard Genette’s use of ‘mode’ in The Architext: An Introduction, trans. Jane E. Lewin (Berkeley, CA: U of California P, 1992), pp. 60–72. Lewalski provides more detailed context on the relation between elegy, Protestant funeral sermons and meditations (72–107, 174–95).
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Aristotle, The ‘Art’ of Rhetoric 1388b1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1926); Thomas Hobbes, trans., The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy, ed. John T. Harwood (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois UP, 1986), p. 84.
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On the English formulary letters and their attitude to grief, see G. W. Pigman, Grief and English Renaissance Elegy (Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1985), pp. 11–27.
Alexander Gil, Parerga (1632); see Stella P. Revard, Milton and the Tangles of Neaera’s Hair: The Making of the 1645 Poems (Columbia, MO: U of Missouri P, 1997), pp. 44–7.
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Cedric Brown notes that ‘at school and university, Milton was bred to competitive performance’. John Milton: A Literary Life (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1995), p. 2.
See also John Dolan, Poetic Occasion from Milton to Wordsworth (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), pp. 18–55.
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Alice Horton, ‘An Exploration into the Etymology of Lycidas’, Milton Quarterly 32.3 (1998): 106–7.
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On the relevance of the address to the mother see also Amy Boesky, ‘The Maternal Shape of Mourning: A Reconsideration of Lycidas’, Modern Philology 95.4 (May 1998): 463–83.
Owen Feltham, ‘On His Beloved Friend the Authour’, Poems, with the Muses Looking-Glasse, and Amyntas by Thomas Randolph (1643), sig. A8V.
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J. V. [John Vaughan?], inscribed in Christchurch copy of Donne’s 1633 Poems. Cited in John Donne: The Critical Heritage, ed. A. J. Smith, vol. 1 (Routledge, 1983), p. 105.
Thomas Jordan, ‘An Elegy on … Sir Nath. Brent Knight’, Wit in a Wildernesse of Promiscuous Poesie ([1665?]), sig. †† 4V.
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Em. D., ‘To his Friend the author’, Poems Divine, and Humane by Thomas Beedome (1641), sig. A5V.
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Brady, A. (2006). The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric. In: English Funerary Elegy in the Seventeenth Century. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230554870_2
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