Print Elegies, Henry Vaughan, and the Everyday Deaths of War.

This article examines how seventeenth-century British Civil War elegies responded to the unprecedented scale and pace of wartime mortality and the emerging print news culture between 1638 and 1651. It argues that these elegies adapted traditional mourning poetry to reflect the relentless, serialized deaths of combatants reported in periodical news, often emphasizing the repetitive and fleeting nature of loss rather than offering consolatory closure or lasting memorialization. Focusing on poets such as Henry Vaughan, whose 1646 elegy on a fallen soldier uses emblems like the "blind dial" to symbolize the ephemerality and accelerated temporality of war deaths, the essay highlights how these poems engaged with the challenges of commemorating mass death amid ongoing conflict and information overload. The elegies thus contributed to shaping a collective "public present," articulating a wartime "structure of feeling" characterized by continuous, open-ended violence and mediated immediacy, while questioning the efficacy of poetic memorials in such a context.