The Ritual of Elegiac Rhetoric

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.