gwynhefar | Definitions -- literariness

encomium: (n) A formal or high-flown expression of praise; a eulogy, panegyric.

panegyric: (n) 1. A public speech or writing in praise of some person, thing, or achievement; a laudatory discourse, a formal or elaborate encomium or eulogy.
2. Elaborate praise; eulogy; laudation.

eulogy: (n) 1. A speech or writing in commendation of the character and services of a person, or the qualities of a thing; esp. a set oration in honour of a deceased person.
2. Eulogistic speaking; commendation, praise.

elegy: (n) 1. A song of lamentation, esp a funeral song or lament for the dead.
2. Vaguely used in the wider sense, apparently originally including all the species of poetry for which Greek and Latin poets adopted the elegaic metre.
3. Poetry, or a poem, written in elegaic metre; an elegaic distich.

distich: (n) A couple of lines of verse, usually making complete sense, and (in modern poetry) riming; a couplet.

I tend very often to get elegy and eulogy mixed up, mainly because both are associated with poems about dead people. It is of course made more difficult by the fact that a poem honouring the deceased may be both an elegy and a eulogy, or it may be one but not the other, or it may be neither. In addition, neither elegy nor eulogy are required to be funereal, so either one could be about either a live person, or a place, or practically anything else. Of course, I am a working on an MA in literature. You'd think I'd have gotten this figured out by now.