17/08/23, 17:46 Lyric poetry - Wikipedia

Lyric poetry
Modern lyric poetry is a formal type of poetry which
expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken
in the first person.[1]

It is not equivalent to song lyrics, though song lyrics are

often in the lyric mode, and it is also not equivalent to
Ancient Greek lyric poetry, which was principally limited Lyric Poetry (1896) Henry Oliver Walker, in
to song lyrics, or chanted verse. The term for both the Library of Congress's Thomas
modern lyric poetry and modern song lyrics derives from Jefferson Building.
a form of Ancient Greek literature, the Greek lyric, which
was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on a
stringed instrument known as a kithara, a seven-stringed lyre (hence "lyric").[a][2]

The term owes its importance in literary theory to the division developed by Aristotle among three
broad categories of poetry: lyrical, dramatic, and epic. Lyric poetry is one of the earliest forms of
literature.

Meters
Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress –
with two short syllables typically being exchangeable for one long syllable – which is required for
song lyrics in order to match lyrics with interchangeable tunes that followed a standard pattern of
rhythm. Although much modern lyric poetry is no longer song lyrics, the rhythmic forms have
persisted without the music.

The most common meters are as follows:

Iambic – two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable followed by the long or stressed
syllable.
Trochaic – two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable followed by the short or unstressed
syllable. In English, this metre is found almost entirely in lyric poetry.[3]
Pyrrhic – Two unstressed syllables
Anapestic – three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
Dactylic – three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or
unstressed.
Spondaic – two syllables, with two successive long or stressed syllables.

Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

History

Antiquity

Greece

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For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had a precise technical

meaning: Verse that was accompanied by a lyre, cithara, or
barbitos. Because such works were typically sung, it was also
known as melic poetry. The lyric or melic poet was
distinguished from the writer of plays (although Athenian
drama included choral odes, in lyric form), the writer of
trochaic and iambic verses (which were recited), the writer of
elegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the
writer of epic.[5] The scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created
a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical
study. These archaic and classical musician-poets included Alcaeus and Sappho depicted on
Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar. Archaic lyric was an Attic red-figure calathus
characterized by strophic composition and live musical c. 470 BC[4]
performance. Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical
forms in odes to a triad, including strophe, antistrophe
(metrically identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does not match that of the strophe).[6]

Rome

Among the major surviving Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus[7] and Horace[8]
wrote lyric poetry, which was instead read or recited. What remained were the forms, the lyric
meters of the Greeks adapted to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic and Hellenistic
Greek verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called the Neoteroi ("New Poets") who
spurned epic poetry following the lead of Callimachus. Instead, they composed brief, highly
polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegies of Tibullus,
Propertius, and Ovid (Amores, Heroides), with their personal phrasing and feeling, may be the
thematic ancestor of much medieval, Renaissance, Romantic, and modern lyric poetry, but these
works were composed in elegiac couplets and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense.[9]

China

During China's Warring States period, the Songs of Chu collected by Qu Yuan and Song Yu defined
a new form of poetry that came from the exotic Yangtze Valley, far from the Wei and Yellow River
homeland of the traditional four-character verses collected in the Book of Songs. The varying
forms of the new Chu Ci provided more rhythm and greater latitude of expression.[10]

Medieval verse

Originating in 10th century Persian, a ghazal is a poetic form consisting of couplets that share a
rhyme and a refrain. Formally, it consists of a short lyric composed in a single meter with a single
rhyme throughout. The subject is love. Notable authors include Hafiz, Amir Khusro, Auhadi of
Maragheh, Alisher Navoi, Obeid e zakani, Khaqani Shirvani, Anvari, Farid al-Din Attar, Omar
Khayyam, and Rudaki. The ghazal was introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by
the Germans Schlegel, Von Hammer-Purgstall, and Goethe, who called Hafiz his "twin".[11]

Lyric in European literature of the medieval or Renaissance period means a poem written so that it
could be set to music—whether or not it actually was. A poem's particular structure, function, or
theme might all vary.[12] The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created by the pioneers of
courtly poetry and courtly love largely without reference to the classical past.[13] The troubadors,
travelling composers and performers of songs, began to flourish towards the end of the
11th century and were often imitated in successive centuries. Trouvères were poet-composers who
were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their
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works in the northern dialects of France. The first known trouvère was Chrétien de Troyes
(fl. 1160s–80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was the minnesang, "a
love lyric based essentially on a fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady".[14]
Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, minnesang soon established
a distinctive tradition.[14] There was also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric.[15]

Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle Ages included Yehuda Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and
Abraham ibn Ezra.

In Italy, Petrarch developed the sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante's Vita
Nuova. In 1327, according to the poet, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-
Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the Rime sparse ("Scattered
rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of
366 poems Il Canzoniere ("The Song Book"). Laura is in many ways both the culmination of
medieval courtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric.

A bhajan or kirtan is a Hindu devotional song. Bhajans are often simple songs in lyrical language
expressing emotions of love for the Divine. Notable authors include Kabir, Surdas, and Tulsidas.

Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre popular from the 12th-century Jin Dynasty
through to the early Ming. Early 14th century playwrights like Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing
were well-established writers of Sanqu. Against the usual tradition of using Classical Chinese, this
poetry was composed in the vernacular.[16]

16th century

In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund
Spenser, and William Shakespeare popularized the sonnet.

In France, La Pléiade—including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean-Antoine de Baïf

—aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry—particularly Marot and the grands
rhétoriqueurs—and began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms such as the odes. Favorite
poets of the school were Pindar, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Horace, and Ovid. They also produced
Petrarchan sonnet cycles.

Spanish devotional poetry adapted the lyric for religious purposes. Notable examples were Teresa
of Ávila, John of the Cross, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Garcilaso de la Vega, and Lope de Vega.
Although better known for his epic Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest
Portuguese lyric poet of the period.

In Japan, the naga-uta ("long song") was a lyric poem popular in this era. It alternated five and
seven-syllable lines and ended with an extra seven-syllable line.

17th century

Lyrical poetry was the dominant form of 17th century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew
Marvell.[17] The poems of this period were short. Rarely narrative, they tended towards intense
expression.[17] Other notable poets of the era include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert,

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Aphra Behn, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, John Milton, Richard Crashaw, and
Henry Vaughan. A German lyric poet of the period is Martin Opitz; in Japan, this was the era of
the noted haiku-writer Matsuo Bashō.

18th century

In the 18th century, lyric poetry declined in England and France. The atmosphere of literary
discussion in the English coffeehouses and French salons was not congenial to lyric poetry.[18]
Exceptions include the lyrics of Robert Burns, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, and Oliver
Goldsmith. German lyric poets of the period include Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Novalis,
Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Heinrich Voß. Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese lyric poet during this
period. In Diderot's Encyclopédie, Louis chevalier de Jaucourt described lyric poetry of the time as
"a type of poetry totally devoted to sentiment; that's its substance, its essential object".[19]

19th century

In Europe, the lyric emerged as the principal poetic form of the

19th century and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry.[20]
Romantic lyric poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the
thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; the feelings were extreme
but personal.[21]

The traditional sonnet was revived in Britain, with William

Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet.[20]
Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel
Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron.
Later in the century, the Victorian lyric was more linguistically self-
Benjamin Haydon's 1842
conscious and defensive than the Romantic forms had been.[22] Such
portrait of William
Victorian lyric poets include Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina
Wordsworth.
Rossetti.

Lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public between
1830 and 1890, as shown in the number of poetry anthologies published in the period.[23]
According to Georg Lukács, the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplified the German
Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition initiated by Goethe, Herder, and Arnim and Brentano's
Des Knaben Wunderhorn.[24]

France also saw a revival of the lyric voice during the 19th century.[25] The lyric became the
dominant mode of French poetry during this period.[25]: 15 For Walter Benjamin, Charles
Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale" in Europe.[26]

In Russia, Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified a rise of lyric poetry during the 18th and early
19th centuries.[27] The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and
their chief poet Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems.[28] Italian lyric poets
of the period include Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio.
Spanish lyric poets include Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, and José de Espronceda.
Japanese lyric poets include Taneda Santoka, Masaoka Shiki, and Ishikawa Takuboku.

20th century

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In the earlier years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the
poet, was the dominant poetic form in the United States,[29] Europe, and the British colonies. The
English Georgian poets and their contemporaries such as A. E. Housman, Walter de la Mare, and
Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore was praised by
William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry; Yeats compared him to the troubadour poets when the
two met in 1912.[30]

The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by
modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and William Carlos Williams, who rejected
the English lyric form of the 19th century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language,
rather than complexity of thought.[31]: 49

After World War II, the American New Criticism returned to the lyric, advocating a poetry that
made conventional use of rhyme, meter, and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric
tradition.[32]

Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex, and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of
American poetry in the middle of the 20th century, following such movements as the confessional
poets of the 1950s and '60s such that included Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.,[31]: 155 the Black
Mountain movement with Robert Creeley, Organic Verse represented by Denise Levertov,
Projective verse (https://www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69406/projective-verse) or "open
field" composition as represented by Charles Olson, and also Language Poetry which aimed for
extreme minimalism along with numerous other experimental verse movements throughout the
remainder of the 20th century, up into today where these questions of what constitutes poetry,
lyrical or otherwise, are still being discussed but now in the context of hypertext and multimedia as
it is used via the Internet.

21st century

With the advancement of internet communication technology, poetry saw a surge in various online
media especially podcasts. Kevin Young, poetry editor at The New Yorker, remarked that "podcasts
connect poetry to a living thing".[33][34][35]

Footnotes
a. A kithara was a professional-grade, medium-voiced (‘tenor’ / ‘baritone’) instrument in the lyre-
family. .

References
1. Scott, Clive (1990). Vers Libre: The emergence of free verse in France, 1886–1914. Oxford,
UK: Clarendon Press. ISBN 9780198151593.
2. Miller, Andrew (1996). Greek Lyric: An anthology in translation (https://books.google.com/book
s?id=80MpjrOfTH8C). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing. pp. xii ff (https://books.google.com/
books?id=80MpjrOfTH8C/books?id=80MpjrOfTH8C&pg=PR12). ISBN 978-087220291-7.
3. Adams, Stephen (1997). Poetic Designs: An introduction to meters, verse forms, and figures of
speech. Broadview Press. p. 55. ISBN 1-55111-129-2.
4. Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2416)
5. Bowra, Cecil (1961). Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides. Oxford, England: Oxford
University Press. p. 3.
6. Halporn, J.; et al. (1994). The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry. Hackett Publishing. p. 16.
ISBN 0-87220-243-7.
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7. Catullus. [no title cited]. Nr. 11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61.
8. Horace. Odes.
9. Bing, P.; et al. (1991). Games of Venus: An anthology of Greek and Roman erotic verse from
Sappho to Ovid. New York, NY: Routledge.
10. 袁行霈 [Yuán Xíngpèi]; et al. (1992). Zhōngguó Wénxué Shǐ 《中国文学史》 (https://web.archi
ve.org/web/20131004221340/http://courses.gxnu.edu.cn/chinese/gdwx/zgwxs.html) [A History
of Chinese Literature] (in Chinese). Vol. 1. Beijing, CN: 高等教育出版社 [Gāoděng Jiàoyù
Chūbǎn Shè]. p. 632. ISBN 978-704016479-4. Archived from the original (http://courses.gxnu.
edu.cn/chinese/gdwx/zgwxs.html) on 4 October 2013. Retrieved 14 July 2013 – via Guangxi
Normal University (www.gxnu.edu.cn). ""Historical Records: Biography of Qu Yuan Jia
Shengform" has a style of deep grief and anger. :chinese: 「《史记·屈原贾生列传》
形成悲愤深沉之风格特征。」 "
11. Thym, J.; et al. (2010). Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the nineteenth-century lied.
Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 221.
12. Shaw, Mary (2003). The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press. pp. 39–40. ISBN 0-521-00485-3.
13. Kay, S; et al. (2006). A Short History of French Literature. Oxford, England: Oxford University
Press. pp. 15–16. ISBN 0-19-815931-5.
14. S., Johnson; et al. (2000). Medieval German Literature: A companion. Routledge. pp. 224–225.
ISBN 0-415-92896-6.
15. Tavani, Giuseppe (2002). Trovadores e Jograis: Introdução à poesia medieval galego-
portuguesa (in Portuguese). Lisbon, PT: Caminho.
16. 「抒情性文学…的创作开创了元代理学家诗文创作的先河。」[10]
17. Corns, Thomas (1993). The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. xi. ISBN 0-521-42309-0.
18. Wilson, Albert, Sir (1957). Lindsay, J.O. (ed.). The New Cambridge Modern History.
Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 73. ISBN 0-521-04545-2.
19. Translated by Collaborative Translation Project. "Lyric Poetry" (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/t/te
xt/text-idx?c=did;cc=did;rgn=main;view=text;idno=did2222.0000.376). Encyclopedia of Diderot
& d'Alembert - Collaborative Translation Project. Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert.
University of Michigan Library. 20 December 2004. Retrieved 1 April 2015.
20. Murray, Christopher John (2004). Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. Taylor &
Francis. p. 700. ISBN 1-57958-422-5.
21. Bygrave, Stephen (1996). Romantic Writings. Routledge. p. ix. ISBN 0-415-13577-X.
22. Slinn, E. Warwick (26 October 2000). Bristow, Joseph (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to
Victorian Poetry. Cambridge University Press. p. 56. ISBN 0-521-64680-4.
23. Sagarra, Eda; Skrine, Peter (1997). A Companion to German Literature: From 1500 to the
present. Blackwell Publishing. p. 149. ISBN 0-631-21595-6.
24. Lukács, György (1993). German Realists in the Nineteenth Century. Cambridge,
Massachusetts: MIT Press. p. 56. ISBN 0-262-62143-6.
25. Prendergast, Christopher (1990). Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to close
reading. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 3. ISBN 0-521-34774-2.
26. Max, Pensky (1993). Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning.
Boston, Massachusetts: University of Massachusetts Press. p. 155. ISBN 1-55849-296-8.
27. Jakobson, Roman (1981). Selected Writings. Walter de Gruyter. p. 282. ISBN 90-279-7686-4.
28. Richardson, W.; et al. (2005). Literature of the World: An introductory study'. Kessinger
Publishing. p. 348. ISBN 1-4179-9433-9.
29. MacGowan, Christopher (2004). Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Blackwell Publishing.
p. 9. ISBN 0-631-22025-9.

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30. Foster, Robert (1998). W.B. Yeats: A life. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 496.
ISBN 0-19-288085-3.
31. Beach, Christopher (2003). The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American
Poetry. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 49. ISBN 0-521-89149-3.
32. Fredman, Stephen (2005). A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry.
Blackwell Publishing. p. 63. ISBN 1-4051-2002-9.
33. Verma, Jeevika (29 June 2019). "Podcasts are providing a new way into poetry" (https://www.n
pr.org/2019/06/29/737073800/podcasts-are-providing-a-new-way-into-poetry). NPR. Retrieved
14 May 2020.
34. Toledano, Omer. Omer's poetry podcast (https://podcasts.apple.com/il/podcast/omers-poetry-p
odcast/id1463216282). Apple Podcasts (podcasts.apple.com) (audio). Retrieved 14 May 2020.
35. Toledano, Omer (30 April 2020). Om, the Universe and I: A poetry collection (https://www.amaz
on.com/dp/B087SGSQY5). ISBN 979-861933239-1.

Further reading
Gosse, Edmund William (1911). "Lyrical Poetry" (https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/1911_Encyclo
p%C3%A6dia_Britannica/Lyrical_Poetry). Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 17 (11th ed.).
pp. 180–181.
Wilhelm, James J., ed. (1990). Lyrics of the Middle Ages: An anthology (https://books.google.c
om/books?id=rIOUgtk_DJgC). New York, NY: Garland Pub. ISBN 0-8240-7049-6 – via Google
Books.

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