Writing about genre tends to require broad definitions and big claims. Without them, you can expect readers and interlocutors to ask, with barely veiled frustration, “But what makes this poem an elegy?” Especially if the poem is not about the death of a loved one. Or not about death at all. I get this question a lot. And I should begin by confessing something. Writing about elegy in a scholarly mode feels strange to me. Strange because I probably will not finish the book on political elegy that...