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Elizabeth Singer Rowe (1674–1737) spent forty years negotiating and intervening in the gendered frameworks of the cultural poetics of her time. Nevertheless, despite a number of studies that explore Rowe's engagement with emerging literary trends and her posthumous reputation, little has been said about her self-conscious construction of a literary career trajectory. This essay seeks to address this lacuna by revisiting a number of poems, particularly her famous elegy to her husband, which helped to shape her career and reputation. Rowe's early poems reveal the care and deliberation with which she positioned herself. As a contrast to these earlier, explicit expressions, the elegy's implicit and intensely personal struggle with creative expression itself marks a turning point in Rowe's self-construction. In transforming her private griefs into an expressive form that specifically foregrounds poetic agency and ambition, Rowe co-opts a male elegiac tradition that makes her poem extremely influential for later women writers. Recognizing the various ways in which Rowe constructed her professional role and claimed poetic authority gives us a better sense of her aesthetic contributions to eighteenth-century verse traditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discovery of a manuscript of Marvell's Latin poem on the abbé Maniban sheds light on the text and context of that work. As well as offering separate witness to Marvell's poem, the manuscript ‘Grammatomantis’ provides a rare example of the circulation of his poetry other than his satires on affairs of state. It also helps settle an old conjecture about what occasion invited Marvell's writing and sending these elegiac distichs to his favourite nephew, William Popple, in Bordeaux. The poem reveals habits of voice and imagination characteristic of Marvell. His lasting concern about inquisitorial persecution finds expression, making the work something of a companion piece for the comparable Latin elegiac distichs in ‘Scævola Scoto-Brittannus’. The anticlerical impulse of ‘Grammatomantis’ is in keeping with other of Marvell's writings in the 1670s. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The name that Shelley chose to give to Keats in his elegy has puzzled editors for over a century, and although a solution proposed by Earl Wasserman forty years ago has come to be accepted as definitive, certain drawbacks leave it open to question. This short paper offers a new solution to the puzzle and hence a challenge to Wasserman's influential hypothesis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The question of why Milton's poems of the 1620s and 1630s were published at the end of 1645 remains to be satisfactorily answered. The sonnet that Milton sent to Henry Lawes at the beginning of 1646, probably to accompany a presentation copy of the Poems, can shed light on the political and personal reasons behind the decision to publish at this moment, even though Milton repudiated some of the poems (such as the Latin elegies) and others, such as the elegy for Lancelot Andrewes, seem to jar with the reformist image projected in the prose. Lawes was the most prominent member of the royalist literary community with whom Milton had a personal and creative connexion. 'To My Friend Mr Henry Lawes' signals Milton's desire for cultural rapprochement with royalist writers and artists in the aftermath of the hostile Presbyterian reaction to the divorce tracts. The sonnet adopts the style of a Jonsonian epigram and may make reference to unpublished writing by one of the royalists' favourite poets, William Cartwright. Yet the allusion to Dante in the final lines of the sonnet, which conceals a further allusion to Lucan, hints at Milton's residual suspicion of Cavalier poetics and his sense of prophetic vocation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that Allan Ramsay's earlier reputation as an avatar of Romantic practice has been lost in the critical turn of the post-war era. More recently, the renewed trend towards historicising Romanticism has contributed to increasing interest in Ramsay as an early collector and adapter of popular forms: but these accounts have not explored the range or depth of his innovation in not only bringing song-collecting into the canon, but also inflecting elite genres into vernacular forms and ironically commenting on Addisonian politeness through the creation of a synthetic Scots. 'Allan Ramsay and the Decolonization of Genre' examines Ramsay's work in these areas in the cultural and political context of the Edinburgh of his day, focussing in particular on his use of elegy and pastoral to define the concerns and shape of a future Scottish literature. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

`Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings', Dryden's first published poem, contains a striking amount of metaphysical material. Critics have approached it in two ways, concentrating either on the elegy's metaphysical moments as a sign of Dryden's immature taste or on its more neoclassical passages to distinguish it from other explicitly metaphysical poems in Lachrymae Musaruin, the volume of elegies for Hastings in which it appeared. This article argues that Dryden's elegy neither stands apart from others in the volume nor supplies evidence of immaturity: he was in fact interested in metaphysical imagery and themes for much of his career, and his later work contains not only general metaphysical material, but some which is borrowed from `Upon the Death of the Lord Hastings', and from other elegies in Lachrymae Musarum. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traces the impact of 'Monody on the Death of Queen Caroline,' by Richard West on Gray's 'Elegy.' Reference of West's poem to 'Lycidas,' by John Milton; Form of the elegy by West on the death of Queen Caroline; Influence of West on some public elegies on the deaths of monarchs.

Provides information on the elegy written by poet R.S. Thomas for his fellow poet Dylan Thomas with the 1955 poem `Song at the Year's Turning.' Significance of the poem's title; His confrontation with the life of the Welsh hill farmers in his rural parish; Impact of Dylan Thomas' 1953 death on poetry.

This article focuses on local habitations and names in MS Rawlinson C 813 in the Bodleian Library in Oxford, England. MS Rawlinson C 813 now consists of two originally separate manuscripts, and it is with the first, now numbered fos. 1-98, that this article is concerned. The manuscript is well known as one of the major repositories of late medieval and early sixteenth-century courtly love lyrics. A very rough and ready classification of the lyric verse yields some thirty-nine courtly love lyrics, five poems concerned with death in the form of two epitaphs, two lamentations, and a testament, four humorous or light poems, and three moral and admonitory ones. Earlier scholarship on the manuscript has spoken variously of two, three, or four hands involved in its copying. Although there are some differences in letter-forms, and in orthographic conventions, between different parts of the manuscript, a number of highly distinctive letter-forms and a single mode of layout are found throughout, and indicate one hand, possibly over a period of years.

The article presents information on poet Johannes Secundus and Renaissance Latin poetry. In the course of a career, Johannes Secundus (1511-36) produced not only the celebrated "Basia" but also an imposing array of odes, elegies, epigrams, and other compositions. The changing fortunes of this once famous poet are mirrored in the editorial history of his text and in its critical interpretation. It may be worthwhile pausing to reflect on the various approaches offered by recent scholarship to Johannes Secundus as a Renaissance Latin poet. The importance since the Renaissance of anthologies of neo-Latin poetry in forming and fostering taste for this voluminous body of writing has long been recognized.

The article informs that in an essay Michael Gearin-Tosh offered the first extensive account of the second of Marvell's surviving elegies, "Upon the Death of The Lord Hastings." Gearin-Tosh found occasion, nevertheless, to doubt the intensity of Marvell's commitment to either Charles or Hastings--a doubt intensified by the disappointments of the alchemical imagery which he was the first to identify. Explanation of two further cruces does nothing to undermine this reading, and may add to an appreciation of Marvell's achievement in the poem.

The article focuses on authorship issue related to the works of the poet Lodowick Bryskett. It informs that commentators have demonstrated quite conclusively that "The Mourning Muse of Thestylis" and "A pastorall Aeglogue Vpon the Death of Sir Phillip Sidney Knight," two of the elegies on Sidney printed with Spenser's "Astrophel" in 1595 were written by Spenser's friend and colleague Bryskett. The attribution of both poems to Bryskett, however, raises an unanswered question that John Payne Collier first posed over a century ago.

The article attempts to ascertain the date of poems and verses. None of this can definitely establish the poem's date, but the circumstantial evidence seems compelling. It is known that John Donne was staying at Polesworth at only one period: he and Henry Goodyer had each written an elegy for the Prince, and each wrote an epithalamion for his sister. One copy was inserted into a manuscript containing Goodyer's epithalamion, accompanied by an elegy on Prince Henry, which seems to have circulated with it. The other survives in a manuscript of other East Midland pieces from the 1620s and earlier which shares many items with its fellow.