The elegy is a form of lyric text (Poetry) that can be defined in terms of form, content, and discourse mode. The multifaceted development history of the genre, however, precludes a single, all-encompassing definition.
Ancient Greek literature already had two traditions. Elegeía was a poem in elegiac distichs (distichon: a couplet, consisting of one hexameter followed by a pentameter), while élegos was a lament with flute accompaniment, sung in any m…