elegist

Donald Hall is our time's great elegist.

As a result, the elegist is forced to go through increasingly complicated contortions in order to sound sufficiently simple.

She remains a superb elegist and a poet of almost no modernist inclinations whatsoever.

Connolly was the great elegist of failure.

Any elegist must confront this fact.

He's become, perforce, something of an elegist.

No, elegist of the everyday.

He is an elegist.

Part literary critic, part existential elegist, he presents himself as the polymath's polymath.

In passages like this, Edmund White the elegist, the essayist, the autobiographer and the novelist come together.

Doty has long been an elegist.

Readers who know her for a famous passage or two from "Requiem" think of her primarily as an elegist of genius.

He is an elegist, but he is also someone who thinks that "human beings are human beings.

The Holocaust made Glatstein not just an elegist for the destruction of the European Jews, but an arguer with God.

This collection by a versatile elegist and observer of nature features vivid poems that are, refreshingly, about something: many tell stories that serve to preserve her family's history.

To write of New England was to write New England's elegy, and Mr. Hall has become our great elegist.

The death of his youngest brother Larry in the Vietnam War inspired some poignant and powerful haiku, and made his reputation as a haiku elegist.

Ovid is traditionally considered the final significant love elegist in the evolution of the genre and one of the most versatile in his handling of the genre's conventions.

But if Lubitsch, who died in 1947, was the elegist of a Continental civilization ruled equally by passions and by protocols, he was also something of a prophet.

The game is like a mistress, its great elegist, John Updike, has written - and, we should probably add, like a boyfriend as well: voluptuous and severe, yielding and withholding, punishing and seductive.

Mr. Perrin was an elegist of small things: the bubbling and sighing of apples in a cider press; the precisely forged edge of a samurai's sword, with its layers of folded steel.

-David Daiches, Willa Cather: A Critical Introduction, 1951 It is customary to speak of Willa Cather as an "elegist" of the American pioneer tradition.

Ovid has been considered a highly inventive love elegist who plays with traditional elegiac conventions and elaborates the themes of the genre; Quintilian even calls him a "sportive" elegist.

But if the world most of us inhabit is passing quickly into oblivion - being replaced by a universe faster and vaster, where machine memory grows as cultural memory shrinks - what a marvelous elegist Heaney makes!