Winner of the Christian Gauss Award from the Phi Beta Kappa Society Peter Sacks explores the functions as well as the forms of convention in a book that is both an interpretive study of a genre and a series of close readings of individual poems. Moving from Spenser's Astrophel of 1595 to Yeats's In Memory of Major Robert Gregory of 1918, Sacks examines such elegiac motifs and conventions as the use of pastoral contexts, the employment of...