Jonathan N. Barron is an associate professor of English at theUniversity of Southern Mississippi. Beginning in 2001, he will be the editor in chief of The Robert Frost Review. In the following essay, Barron discusses how the elegy, as an ancient poetic genre, explains the principle theme of "The Hospital Window."

Elegy, one of the most ancient and important poetic genres, has, in the past 150 years, undergone such a shift that recent scholars now distinguish between the elegy, on the one hand, and a new "modern elegy" on the other hand. One scholar, a professor of English at theUniversity of Virginia, Jahan Ramazani, has done the most work on this distinction. According to him, the modern elegy does not conform to its traditional three-part mission: consolation, lamentation, praise. Instead, the modern elegy, as he says, "rebel[s] against generic norms but reclaims them through rebellion." This means that...