What’s memorial poetry?

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Memorial poetry aims to remember or praise, in verse, a loved one who has passed away. Also called elegies, these poems are read aloud at funerals or published in honor of the deceased. There are no uniform styles or rules associated with memorial poetry. With the proliferation of memorial websites and pages online, memorial poems are becoming a more popular means of remembering someone.

Poetry is a form of literary art. The Greek philosopher Aristotle tried to define poetry in his “Poetics”. Aristotle believed that the difference between a poet and a historian goes beyond verse and prose, but pertains to the latter capturing the stark facts and the former capturing the raw emotions of a person or event. Classical, medieval and modern poetry followed a set of pre-established rules and patterns from classical dactylic hexameter to English iambic pentameter through Anglo-Saxon alliteration. More modern poetry, such as Emily Dickinson’s, has attempted to break down such rules and allow for more creativity.

This type of poem is a collection of moments, memories and feelings that focus on an individual. They can be highly personal, linking the poet to a person’s deceased or general celebrations. Other forms will leave the deceased out of the poem, but the feelings will be known to all who read it.

The poet can use any form he wishes or no form at all. The most important element of a memorial poem is the memory and the emotion attached to it. For this there are no rules that regulate the length, the metre, the rhyme structure of the themes.

Some poets and historians believe that early epics such as Homer’s Iliad are early and lengthy attempts to write memorial poetry. Classical elegy uses elegiac couplets with the former having an increasing quality balanced by the decreasing quality of the latter. Classic examples of elegies include Ovid mourning his exile and Catullus mourning his brother’s death. After the fall of the Roman Empire, elegies remained popular as tombstone epitaphs.

Memorial poetry continued to be popular during the Middle Ages, although it was confined to the upper echelons of society. King Hakon of Norway, for example, was remembered in the poem “Hakonarmal”, which built on earlier memorial poems such as “Eiriksmal”. In America, poets and poems such as Robert Frost’s “My Butterfly: An Elegy” and Emily Dickinson’s “Asleep” helped make the format more popular.

Eulogy is very different from memorial poetry and elegies. The eulogy is a speech, perhaps written with verse in mind, that is read in praise of the deceased at a funeral service. One of the most famous eulogies is Pericles’ funeral oration, as recorded by Thucydides in his history of the Peloponnesian War.

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