Poetry

===Elegy===
{{Main|Elegy}}
[[File:PortraitThomasGrayByJohnGilesEccart1747to1748.jpg|thumb|upright|[[Thomas Gray]]]]
An elegy is a mournful, melancholy or plaintive poem, especially a [[lament]] for the dead or a [[funeral]] song. The term "elegy," which originally denoted a type of poetic meter ([[elegiac]] meter), commonly describes a poem of [[mourning]]. An elegy may also reflect something that seems to the author to be strange or mysterious. The elegy, as a reflection on a death, on a sorrow more generally, or on something mysterious, may be classified as a form of lyric poetry.<ref>{{Cite book |last=Pigman |first=G. W. |url=https://archive.org/details/griefenglishrena0000pigm |title=Grief and English Renaissance elegy |publisher=Cambridge University Press |year=1985 |isbn=978-0-521-26871-4 |pages=[https://archive.org/details/griefenglishrena0000pigm/page/40 40–47] |url-access=registration}}</ref><ref>{{Cite book |last=Kennedy |first=David |title=Elegy |publisher=Routledge |year=2007 |isbn=978-1-134-20906-4 |pages=10–34}}</ref>

Notable practitioners of elegiac poetry have included [[Propertius]], [[Jorge Manrique]], [[Jan Kochanowski]], [[Chidiock Tichborne]], [[Edmund Spenser]], [[Ben Jonson]], [[John Milton]], [[Thomas Gray]], [[Charlotte Smith (writer)|Charlotte Smith]], [[William Cullen Bryant]], [[Percy Bysshe Shelley]], [[Johann Wolfgang von Goethe]], [[Evgeny Baratynsky]], [[Alfred Tennyson]], [[Walt Whitman]], [[Antonio Machado]], [[Juan Ramón Jiménez]], [[William Butler Yeats]], [[Rainer Maria Rilke]], and [[Virginia Woolf]].