ABSTRACT

Given both the innovations and reconfigurations of the elegy tracked within this book, how might the standard definition of the genre be revised? As noted in the Introduction, The Princeton Handbook of Poetic Terms defines the elegy as “a lyric, usually formal in tone and diction, suggested either by the death of an actual person or by the poet’s contemplation of the tragic aspects of life. This chapter presents prompts for further discussion on the topic of revisiting the elegy in the Black Lives Matter era. Prompts are presented for reading groups, the classroom, creative writers and scholar-poets, and for the activists. One of the prompts for the reading groups is to compare several of the most canonical elegies in the Anglo-American canon—John Milton’s “Lycidas,” Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard,” and W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats,” Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!,” Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” among others—to the ones in this book.