Go to reference.com:
http://ask.reference.com/information
Put in "elegy poem" or "prose poem" or whatever type of poetry you are considering. I was surprised at how much info it turned up. You should use this to search for additional information to help you make up your mind on whether you want to take a certain genre or not.
Second:
A few students have been writing me about the definitions section. Some people are under the impression that the definitions section is a list of words and their definitions. It is, but it has to be written in the format like the rest of your paper.
Here is an email to one of the students where I provided examples of how the definitions section should be written.
From an academic book:
Maybe it shouldn't surprise us that a well-educated British Christian would so disparage elements of "primitive religion." ("Primitive religion" denotes the religion of nonliterate peoples broadly, whether hunter-gatherer or agrarian.)
Maybe it shouldn't surprise us that a well-educated British Christian would so disparage elements of "primitive religion." ("Primitive religion" denotes the religion of nonliterate peoples broadly, whether hunter-gatherer or agrarian.)
From another area of the chapter:
"Animism" is sometimes definted as the attribution of life to the inanimate--considering rivers and clouds and stars alive. This is part of what Tylor meant by the term, but not all. The primitive animist, in Tyler's scheme, saw living and nonliving things alike as inhabited by--animated by--a soul or spirit; rivers and clouds, birds and beasts, and people, too, has this "ghost-soul," this "vapour film, or shadow," this "cause of life and thought in the individual it animates."
Note how in the second example, the writer gets into a discussion of how the terms compare to the experts with whom he is working. The name of this book I took the above passages from is The Evolution of God by Robert Wright.
