Modernlyric poetry is a formal type ofpoetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken in the first person.[1]The term for both modern lyric poetry and modernsong lyrics derives from a form ofAncient Greek literature, theGreek lyric, which was defined by its musical accompaniment, usually on an instrument known as akithara, a seven-stringed lyre (hence "lyric"). These three are not equivalent, though song lyricsare often in the lyric mode andAncient Greeklyric poetrywas principally chanted verse.[a][2]
The term owes its importance inliterary theory to the division developed byAristotle among three broad categories of poetry: lyrical,dramatic, andepic. Lyric poetry is one of the earliest forms of literature.
Much lyric poetry depends on regularmeter based either on syllable or on stress – two short syllables or one long syllable typically counting as equivalent – which is required forsong 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 – twosyllables, with the short or unstressedsyllable 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]
For theancient Greeks,lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: Verse that was accompanied by alyre,cithara, orbarbitos. 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 oftrochaic andiambic verses (which were recited), the writer ofelegies (accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epic.[5]The scholars ofHellenisticAlexandria created a canon ofnine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study. Thesearchaic and classical musician-poets includedSappho,Alcaeus,Anacreon andPindar. Archaic lyric was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance. Some poets, likePindar extended the metrical forms inodes to a triad, includingstrophe,antistrophe (metrically identical to the strophe) andepode (whose form doesnot match that of the strophe).[6]
Among the major survivingRoman poets of the classical period, onlyCatullus (Carmina11,17,30,34,51,61) andHorace (Odes) wrote lyric poetry,[citation needed] which was instead read or recited.[citation needed] What remained were the forms, the lyric meters of the Greeks adapted to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic andHellenistic Greek verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called theNeoteroi ("New Poets") who spurnedepic poetry following the lead ofCallimachus. Instead, they composed brief, highly polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegies ofTibullus,Propertius, andOvid (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 inelegiac couplets and so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense.[7]
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.[10]The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created by the pioneers of courtly poetry andcourtly love largely without reference to the classical past.[11]Thetroubadors, 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 works in thenorthern dialects of France. The first knowntrouvère wasChrétien de Troyes (fl. 1160s–80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was theminnesang, "a love lyric based essentially on a fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady".[12]Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères,minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition.[12] There was also a large body of medievalGalician-Portuguese lyric.[13]
In Italy,Petrarch developed thesonnet form pioneered byGiacomo da Lentini andDante'sVita 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 theRime sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poemsIl Canzoniere ("The Song Book"). Laura is in many ways both the culmination of medievalcourtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric.
In Japan, thenaga-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.
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.[16]Exceptions include the lyrics ofRobert Burns,William Cowper,Thomas Gray, andOliver Goldsmith. German lyric poets of the period includeJohann Wolfgang von Goethe,Novalis,Friedrich Schiller, andJohann Heinrich Voß.Kobayashi Issa was a Japanese lyric poet during this period. In Diderot'sEncyclopédie, 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".[17]
In Europe, the lyric emerged as the principal poetic form of the 19th century and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry.[18]Romantic lyric poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; the feelings were extreme but personal.[19]
France also saw a revival of the lyric voice during the 19th century.[23]The lyric became the dominant mode of French poetry during this period.[23]: 15 ForWalter Benjamin,Charles Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale" in Europe.[24]
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,[27] Europe, and theBritish colonies. The EnglishGeorgian poets and their contemporaries such asA. E. Housman,Walter de la Mare, andEdmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poetRabindranath Tagore was praised byWilliam Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry; Yeats compared him to the troubadour poets when the two met in 1912.[28]
The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question bymodernist poets such asEzra Pound,T. S. Eliot,H.D., andWilliam 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.[29]: 49
After World War II, the AmericanNew 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.[30]
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 theconfessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who includedSylvia Plath andAnne Sexton.[29]: 155 theBlack Mountain movement withRobert Creeley, Organic Verse represented byDenise Levertov,Projective verse or "open field" composition as represented byCharles Olson, and alsoLanguage 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.
^Bowra, Cecil (1961).Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides.Oxford, England: Oxford University Press. p. 3.
^Halporn, J.; et al. (1994).The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry. Hackett Publishing. p. 16.ISBN0-87220-243-7.
^Bing, P.; et al. (1991).Games of Venus: An anthology of Greek and Roman erotic verse from Sappho to Ovid. New York, NY: Routledge.
^ab袁行霈 [Yuán Xíngpèi]; et al. (1992).Zhōngguó Wénxué Shǐ《中国文学史》 [A History of Chinese Literature] (in Chinese). Vol. 1. Beijing, CN:高等教育出版社 [Gāoděng Jiàoyù Chūbǎn Shè]. p. 632.ISBN978-704016479-4. Archived fromthe original on 4 October 2013. Retrieved14 July 2013 – viaGuangxi 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。」
^Thym, J.; et al. (2010).Of Poetry and Song: Approaches to the nineteenth-century lied.Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. p. 221.
^Shaw, Mary (2003).The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry.Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 39–40.ISBN0-521-00485-3.
^abCorns, Thomas (1993).The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. xi.ISBN0-521-42309-0.
^Wilson, Albert, Sir (1957). Lindsay, J.O. (ed.).The New Cambridge Modern History.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 73.ISBN0-521-04545-2.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list (link)
^"Lyric Poetry".Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert - Collaborative Translation Project. Encyclopedia of Diderot & d'Alembert. Translated by Collaborative Translation Project. University of Michigan Library. 20 December 2004.Archived from the original on 2 April 2015. Retrieved1 April 2015.
^abMurray, Christopher John (2004).Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760–1850. Taylor & Francis. p. 700.ISBN1-57958-422-5.
^Bygrave, Stephen (1996).Romantic Writings. Routledge. p. ix.ISBN0-415-13577-X.
^Slinn, E. Warwick (26 October 2000). Bristow, Joseph (ed.).The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry. Cambridge University Press. p. 56.ISBN0-521-64680-4.
^Sagarra, Eda; Skrine, Peter (1997).A Companion to German Literature: From 1500 to the present. Blackwell Publishing. p. 149.ISBN0-631-21595-6.
^abPrendergast, Christopher (1990).Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to close reading.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 3.ISBN0-521-34774-2.
^abBeach, Christopher (2003).The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry.Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press. p. 49.ISBN0-521-89149-3.
^Fredman, Stephen (2005).A Concise Companion to Twentieth-Century American Poetry. Blackwell Publishing. p. 63.ISBN1-4051-2002-9.
