LYRIC

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 LYRIC

LYRIC DEFINITION

A lyric (lih-RIK) is a type of personal rhythmic poetry. A lyric poem does not contain a narrative because its intent is making feelings understood rather than relating events. It is concerned with the often intense or complicated feelings of the speaker (who may or may not be the poet themselves).

The word lyric comes from the lyre, an ancient Greek portable harp frequently used by performers. Lyrical poetry was originally meant to be set to music and performed. With the advent of the printing press, performed poetry took a backseat to written works, but since the mid-20th century and the ubiquitous access to popular music, people are as likely to hear a lyric as they are to read it.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle categorized all poetry as either lyrical, dramatic, or epic. Where epic poetry is meant to represent and appeal to an entire culture, lyric poetry is more personal. Epics are typically told in third-person omniscient point of view, while lyrics are almost always in first person. A lyric poem seldom takes up more than a page; an epic can be several books long. Dramatic poetry, meanwhile, is almost a hybrid: it tells a story, but it is driven by emotion.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF LYRIC POETRY

In ancient Greece, poets performed their work with musical accompaniment, usually in the form of lyres, other stringed instruments, or panpipes. Some of the earliest lyrics poems were compiled by the library of Alexandria, including the work of Sappho. These traditions were also carried on by a few poets in ancient Rome.

The Book of Songs, comprised of works written between 11 and 7 BC in China, contains hymns, eulogies, and even folk songs. These were most likely crafted by uncredited common people writing about their everyday lives. They employed the use of meter and focused on subjects like love, loss, work, war, and politics.

As early as the 7th century, the first incarnations of the ghazal, a type of lyric poem composed of couplets, began to appear in Arabia. Around the 11th century, troubadours started making their way through Europe. As with the ghazal, the troubadours’ lyric works often concerned courtly love. In 12th-century Italy, the poet Petrarch developed the sonnet, a 14-line poem that Edmund Spencer and William Shakespeare would modify and popularize in the 15th century.

The popularity of lyric poetry saw peaks and lulls from that point up to the beginning of the 20th century, when modernists like T.S. Elliot and William Carlos Williams began to criticize the genre. In the 1950s and ‘60s, confessional poets like Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton brought lyric poetry back into fashion and made it almost a form of activism by discussing sex, mental illness, and other taboo topics.

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