Recusatio
The Recusatio was a familiar feature in the landscape of Imperial Roman poetry. Essentially an excuse for the poet's failure to write panegyric, the recusatio ("refusal") is usually characterised by references to the poet's earlier attempts to write more acceptable verse, attempts interrupted by the appearance of a divinity (usually Apollo, the god of poetry), who coerces the poet into writing lighter elegiac verse.
The Recusatio was a quintessentially Roman attempt to placate the new, imperial family while maintaining a hold on the right to free speech and non-conformist poetry. It's most infamous example is in fact a parody. Ovid, one of the last elegiac poets, began his collection of love poems with a recusatio blaming not Apollo but the god's infant cousin Cupid for his defection from Imperial panegyric.
Propemptikon
Traditionally written on the eve of a departure, the propemptikon poems were a kind of "Bon voyage," but were used by the elegists to attempt to dissuade the beloved from embarking on a journey.
Common themes include vituperation of the inventor of long-distance travel and sailing-ships, concern about unwanted male attention at fashionable seaside resorts and fantasies about reunion with the beloved on her return. Propemptikon poems are frequently paired with celebrations of success – the beloved has cut short the journey, or has decided against travel altogether. Sulpicia, the only female poet from ancient Rome whose work has survived, adapts this formula to write her own Propemptikon: in 3.14 she bemoans her own misfortune in being removed to the countryside by her guardian, and in 3.15 she proclaims a holiday for Rome in celebration of the abandoned journey.
Soteria
A popular contemporary form was the "salvation poem," in which the writer prayed for the recovery of an individual from illness. In the hands of the elegists, the soteria became characterised by a description of the vows that the poet had made and the rites he had performed in his lonely, constant vigil over the body of his beloved.
One underlying feature of the soteria poem is the inevitable portrayal of the beloved as exposed, vulnerable and reliant on the poet for her very survival. This draws attention to the beloved's role as the model, the inspiration and the object of the lover's poetic composition.
Paraclausithyron
Literally translated from the Greek as "beside closed door," the paraclausithyron was the poem supreme of the locked-out lover. Its origins were in the symposiastic poetry of Classical Greece, four centuries before the development of Roman elegy. Following a symposium (a drinking party, at which female citizens would not be present), the young bachelors of the party would parade through the streets of Athens and serenade their beloveds from outside closed front doors.
The Paraclausithyron appears in almost every book of elegiac poetry. The image of the lonely lover waiting outside his mistress's closed door permeates so much of Roman love poetry that it has been explained as a metaphor for the invariably unsuccessful attempts of the poet-lover to fully possess his beloved.
