The Penguin Book of Elegy - Poems of Memory, Mourning and Consolation

''A tremendous sentimental education of a book ... a literary adventure ... chosen with a scholarly discernment mixed with a wild-card flair ... fascinating and unignorable'' Kate Kellaway, Observer (Poetry Book of the Month)
''If you have any weakness at all for poetry, this book will draw you in, then devastate you'' Susie Goldsbrough. The Times

Elegy is among the world''s oldest forms of literature. Born in Ancient Greece, practised by the Romans, revitalized by the poets of the Renaissance and continuing down to the present day, it speaks eloquently and affectingly of the experience of loss and the yearning for consolation. It gives shape and meaning to memories too painful to contemplate, and answers our desire to fix in words what would otherwise slip our grasp.

In The Penguin Book of Elegy, Andrew Motion and Stephen Regan trace the history of this tradition, from its Classical roots in the work of Theocritus, Virgil a