Read "Elegy and Classical Metre" by Samuel Taylor Coleridge online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Elegy is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind. It _may_ treat of any subject, but it must treat of no subject _for itself_; but always and exclusively with reference to the poet himself. As he will feel regret for the past or desire for the future, so sorrow and love become the principal themes of elegy. Elegy presents every thing as lost and gone, or absent and future. The elegy is the exact opposite of the Homeric epic, in which all is purely external and objective, and the poet is a mere voice.
The true lyric ode is subjective too; but then it delights to present things as actually existing and visible, although associated with the past, or coloured highly by the subject of the ode itself.