What's the difference between elegy and poem?

Elegy


Definition:

  • (n.) A mournful or plaintive poem; a funereal song; a poem of lamentation.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) Place names and plant names assume the status of chants or litanies: spectral taxa incanted as elegy, or as a means to conjure back.
  • (2) More recently, Iain Sinclair, in his novel Dining on Stones, an elegy to the A13, describes it as: "A landscape to die for: haze lifting to a high clear morning, pylons, distant road, an escarpment of multi-coloured containers, a magical blend of nature and artifice."
  • (3) You can contribute questions, comments, predictions, thoughts, premature elegies, over-the-top obituaries or hushed theories about what David Stern has told tonight's officials by emailing them to hunter.felt.freelance@guardiannews.com or tweeting them to @HunterFelt .
  • (4) His great book Mimesis, published in Berne in 1946 but written while Auerbach was a wartime exile teaching Romance languages in Istanbul, was meant to be a testament to the diversity and concreteness of the reality represented in western literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf; but reading the 1951 essay one senses that, for Auerbach, the great book he wrote was an elegy for a period when people could interpret texts philologically, concretely, sensitively, and intuitively, using erudition and an excellent command of several languages to support the kind of understanding that Goethe advocated for his understanding of Islamic literature.
  • (5) And yet, the result is exactly the same: a face that is not so much a face but rather a sad elegy for what might have been.
  • (6) The result was a masterpiece: a funny, lyrical, wise travelogue which was at once a defence of the wild water that was left and an elegy for that which had gone.
  • (7) The Last Ship is "an elegy for and a celebration of the working-class life of the Newcastle shipyards," according to the Public Theater's artistic director Oskar Eustis, who says it is "shaping up to be a masterpiece".
  • (8) "The mixture of rage and elegy in the book is remarkable," said Michael Wood, reviewing American Pastoral in the New York Times , "and you have only to pause over the prose to feel how beautifully it is elaborated."
  • (9) At the centre of the book is a series of intertwined relationships: there are love poems, poems that explore relationships between languages – versions of CP Cavafy from the Greek, poems in Scots, reworkings of New Testament verse – poems about people he knew, such as an elegy for poet Mick Imlah with whom Crawford co-edited an anthology of Scottish verse, as well as poems about the relationship between history and values.
  • (10) There's a famous passage in John le Carré's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy in which retired agent Connie Sachs drifts into a drunken elegy for the young men of the 1950s, the lost souls who fetched up in Smiley's Circus.
  • (11) The Fix reads only like bitterness, an unconscious elegy to shame; add Iain Duncan Smith's coerced AA meetings, and fair treatment for addicts feels, as ever, far away.
  • (12) When "Sapho to Philaenis" is set in the context of Donne's other love elegies in verse as productions by a young intellectual moving in sophisticated London circles and writing for a coterie audience, lesbianism looks like a master trope for positively resolving a dilemma that confounded Montaigne and many other authors of the age.
  • (13) Kim Brandstrup’s Ceremony of Innocence uses Britten’s Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937) to create a haunting elegy for lost youth, with outstanding roles for its leads Edward Watson and Marcelino Sambé.
  • (14) But with Ukip, it is not just an elegy for a mythical age, but also a call to action.
  • (15) But when, after a troubled hiatus, he returned to complete the manuscript in 1883, what had begun as a reminiscent celebration became a darker elegy for a lost world.
  • (16) The chorus of empathetic responses to the tragic shootings at the Aurora movie theater, near Denver, Colorado early Friday morning marks a stubborn refrain in a perennial American elegy.
  • (17) Ruth Rendell, crime writer, dies aged 85 Read more I woke up this morning to a distant view of dark hills and grey skies and thought inevitably about the opening stanza of WH Auden’s elegy to WB Yeats: The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
  • (18) Their street chants yelled "Death to all those against the Supreme Leader" followed by traditional Shia rituals and elegies.
  • (19) Lipton is a Willy Loman for the 21st century, whose song is an elegy for the passing of an American dream – one that told successive generations that, so long as they worked hard and played by the rules, they'd be better off than their parents.
  • (20) The portraits Freud made of his mother, beginning in 1972 and ending with a drawing from her deathbed in 1989, are a remarkable elegy of ageing and depression.

Poem


Definition:

  • (n.) A metrical composition; a composition in verse written in certain measures, whether in blank verse or in rhyme, and characterized by imagination and poetic diction; -- contradistinguished from prose; as, the poems of Homer or of Milton.
  • (n.) A composition, not in verse, of which the language is highly imaginative or impassioned; as, a prose poem; the poems of Ossian.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) When she died in 1994, Hopkins-Thomas and his mother – Jessie’s niece – were gifted the masses of drawings and poems Knight had collected over the years.
  • (2) When we arrived, he would instruct us to spend the morning composing a song or a poem, or inventing a joke or a charade.
  • (3) His parting tribute to the Things Fall Apart author, said Soyinka, would be the poem he wrote to Achebe when he turned 70.
  • (4) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
  • (5) Whatever conclusion the crowd might have drawn, what's striking is that Tempest's poem couldn't be ignored: the conviction and drama of her performance forced a reaction and coloured the rest of the evening.
  • (6) One particular poem attacked by Liao, he said, is not praising a disgraced party official, but is actually satire.
  • (7) More than once, she replies to a question by wrinkling her nose and saying: “It’s all in the book.” Tempest can’t quite see why the breadth of her output – songs, poems, plays, a novel – is notable, because it’s all about writing and performance.
  • (8) There's no doubt that MacMaster expended an enormous amount of effort compiling the blog and creating Gay Girl's persona: poems, long imaginary reminiscences – even warning readers to treat some other websites "with a very large grain of salt" – but to what purpose?
  • (9) Raymond Hood – Terminal City (1929) 'Poem of towers' … Raymond Hood's 1929 drawings for the proposed Terminal City, in Chicago This never-built design for a massive new skyscraper quarter in Chicago is a vision of the modern city as a shadowed poem of towers; of glass and concrete dwarfing the people.
  • (10) His collection of poems Beware Soul Brother (1971) and the volume of short stories Girls at War and Other Stories (1972) drew on the experiences of the war.
  • (11) His charge sheet includes numerous assaults (one against a waiter who served him the wrong dish of artichokes); jail time for libelling a fellow painter, Giovanni Baglione, by posting poems around Rome accusing him of plagiarism and calling him Giovanni Coglione (“Johnny Bollocks”); affray (a police report records Caravaggio’s response when asked how he came by a wound: “I wounded myself with my own sword when I fell down these stairs.
  • (12) Other big-name winners at the Sony awards included Sir David Attenborough, named speech broadcaster of the year, and Bono, for BBC Radio 4's Elvis By Bono, in which the U2 frontman read a self-penned poem about Elvis Presley set to archive clips and music .
  • (13) When, as a sixth-former, I sent my first, almost-publishable poems to Ross, he returned them, but not with a printed rejection slip.
  • (14) He even recited Tennyson's poem to a classroom of Russian children in Moscow, possibly a tad insensitively, given that it was about an incident in the Crimean war, though they nodded politely.
  • (15) Eliot's poem – composed in the emotional carnage of the post-second world war period – was originally entitled (borrowing, shamelessly, from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend), He Do the Police in Different Voices.
  • (16) Louise Glück’s prose-poem collection, Faithful and Virtuous Night , won for poetry.
  • (17) Although the precise etiopathogenesis of the vascular proliferations remains speculative, these lesions merit study since they constitute an easily recognizable marker of POEMS syndrome.
  • (18) The poem touches a chord, because it doesn't deal with the often incoherent motivations of those who smashed up Tottenham and elsewhere, but the feelings of the rest of us: shocked, unsettled and confused.
  • (19) Hundreds of postcards, letters and parcels arrived, carrying not only words but also books, photographs, maps, stories and poems.
  • (20) She was shortlisted for a Forward prize at the age of 30 for her first collection, The Thing in the Gap-Stone Stile, took the TS Eliot prize with her second , a remarkable book-length poem about the river Dart, and is now, 15 years later, widely hailed as one of British poetry's finest, brightest voices.