Famous Elegies: A Journey Through History

John Milton, an English poet of the 17th century, wrote "Lycidas" as a pastoral elegy mourning the death of a fellow poet, Edward King.

Tennyson's "In Memoriam" is a collection of 131 poems mourning the death of Arthur Henry Hallam, a fellow poet and close friend.

Shelley's "Adonais" is an elegy mourning the untimely death of his friend and fellow Romantic poet, John Keats.

John Keats' "When I Have Fears That I May Cease to Be" is an elegiac sonnet reflecting on his own mortality and the transience of life.

Dylan Thomas' "Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night" is a powerful elegy urging his dying father to resist death and fight for life.

Walt Whitman's "O Captain! My Captain!" is an elegiac poem mourning the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln.

Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" reflects on the lives and deaths of ordinary people buried in a rural churchyard.

John McCrae's "In Flanders Fields" is a poignant elegy commemorating the fallen soldiers of World War I.

Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Dirge Without Music" is an elegy mourning the death of a beloved lover.

T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" is a modernist elegy reflecting the cultural and spiritual fragmentation caused by World War I.

Archibald MacLeish's "Ars Poetica" is an elegiac meditation on the nature and purpose of poetry.

Mary Elizabeth Frye's "Do Not Stand at My Grave and Weep" is a widely-known elegiac poem offering comfort to the bereaved.

Theodore Roethke's "Elegy for Jane" is an elegiac poem mourning the death of his young daughter, Jane.

Christina Rossetti's "When I Am Dead, My Dearest" is an elegiac poem expressing the speaker's desire to be remembered after death.

W.H. Auden's "In Memory of W.B. Yeats" is an elegiac poem mourning the death of his friend and fellow poet, W.B. Yeats.