Literature
Lyric Poetry
Lyric poetry is a type of poetry that expresses personal emotions or feelings. It is often characterized by its musicality, emotional intensity, and brevity. Unlike narrative poetry, which tells a story, lyric poetry focuses on the speaker's inner thoughts and emotions.
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10 Key excerpts on "Lyric Poetry"
- Michael Ferber(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
130 Chapter 7 Romantic love lyrics A large share of Romantic Lyric Poetry, and a large share of the best of it, does not fall under such well-defined categories as “sonnet” or even the looser genre called “ode.” Wordsworth and Coleridge, as we saw, wrote poems of various lengths called “Lines” (usually with a descriptive subtitle), Coleridge wrote “Monodies,” Shelley wrote “Stanzas,” several poets wrote deliberate fragments, and so on. Many Romantic poems were called “songs” and were even set to music, but songs come in many shapes and sizes. Some poems are very short – a couplet or quatrain – while others, such as Coleridge’s “conversation” poems or Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey,” are fairly long. They may or may not come grouped into stanzas or graced with rhyme. The main reason we call all of them “lyric” is merely genealogical, as we trace their ancestry back to songs sung by Greeks to the lyre, and that fact is of little help in categorizing them in 1800 or today. A good handbook of literary terms defines “lyric” as “A brief subjective poem strongly marked by imagination, melody, and emotion, and creating a single, unified impression.” 1 I have no better definition to offer, and yet I have sometimes come across poems that I would like to call “lyric” but that do not strike me as very imaginative, melodious, emotional, or even sub- jective. It might be simpler, then, to retain “lyric” as the residual category after we separate out narrative and dramatic verse, which are more readily defined, or to enumerate its subgenres with a miscellaneous addendum: “lyric poems include odes, sonnets, and the like.” Neither approach is very satisfactory, but they needn’t trouble us as long as we have a rough idea of what we are talking about. An impressive effort to define a distinctively Romantic kind of lyric poem was mounted by M.
eBook - ePub- Elizabeth S. Dodd(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- T&T Clark(Publisher)
A drama or an epic might be metrical, and they might incorporate expressive soliloquys through which a character speaks for themselves. A degree of overlap is not surprising. It not only reflects the difficulties of classifying the diverse and evolving world of poetic form but is also consistent with classic interpretations of lyric as the heart of all poetry. Indeed, G. W. Herder viewed lyric or song as the primal root of all language. 34 Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye took up this unitary theory in his definition of lyric as the musical pole of poetry that exploits the linguistic formation of sense out of sound to craft new ways of speaking. 35 Frye’s perspective is particularly informative for this work, which finds in the music of lyric an opportunity to expand theological engagement with poetry beyond a common emphasis on the imagistic world of metaphor, towards an exploration of breath, sound and performance. Lyric and theology Another reason to focus on lyric in particular as opposed to poetry in general is the influence of the aesthetic taxonomy of epic, lyric and drama on modern theology. 36 This model of the three poetic genres claims a classical foundation in the philosophy of Aristotle and Plato, but finds its modern roots in the poetics of J. W. von Goethe and the æsthetics of G. W. F. Hegel. Hegel’s Æsthetics charted the development of civilization through periods of ‘epic’ and ‘lyric’ creativity towards a ‘dramatic’ era that would finally be superseded by philosophy. As discussed further in Chapter 3, while this great dialectic culminates with drama, Hegel also has much to say about a lyric that is not merely superseded by but incorporated into the dramatic mode. 37 Chapter 2 touches on the vaguely Trinitarian overtones of this tripartite division, which cannot be explored fully in this study
eBook - PDF- Angus Cleghorn, Jonathan Ellis(Authors)
- 2021(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Bishop directed her note- taking on such issues toward developing her own craft. The aforementioned poetics texts were thinking with what Sylvester interchangeably calls “lyrical poetry” and “lyric verse,” meaning poetry that, in large part for its meter, has a musical aspect drawn in part from emotions, or is expressive of an author’s feelings. In a footnote in a chapter theorizing laws of accentual meters, he writes, “At the base of and giving nourishment to our poetical plant, lies Emotion, at once the root and crown of lyric verse.” 7 Notably, this is Sylvester’s one (adjectival) use of the term “lyric” in nearly 200 pages. Lanier only uses the word “lyric” twice in his study of over 300 pages, once to call the sonnet English Lyric Poetry’s “primordial form.” 8 Lanier’s use reminds us that lyric, mentioned or not, was understood in the nineteenth century as poetry’s heart – its earliest and most essential form, or, as John Stuart Mill put it, lyric is “more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other” and “most natural to a really poetic temperament.” 9 This means that Bishop was absorbing lyric both as an object of prosodic analysis and as offered in Romantic theories of art. In these texts and in Bishop’s notes, lyric’s supposed essentiality is assumed – not a point to prove or a subject in itself, as is true in the work of later twentieth-century defenders and detractors of the idea of lyric. If the Romantic and Victorian prosodic theorists Bishop was reading presume by lyric passionate and subjective metrical poetry, they engaged the topic less as an abstract cause than through the prosodic analysis of specific verse genres, by contrast with more contemporary lyric theory’s tendency to attempt to bring into view or respond to (mis)characterizations of the abstract super-genre.
eBook - ePubThe Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics
Fourth Edition
- Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer, Stephen Cushman, Clare Cavanagh, Jahan Ramazani, Paul Rouzer(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Princeton University Press(Publisher)
In the world of ideas, the lyric became “more imminently and peculiarly poetry than any other” verse genre, indeed, so much so that lyric and poetry began to be synonymous terms. While the lyricization of all verse genres meant the creation of a lyric ideal in lit. crit., in the 19th-c. culture of mass print, lyric became a synonym for poetry in another sense by becoming a default term for short poems, a practical name for verse that did not obey the protocols of neoclassical genres such as the Pindaric ode or conform to the popular standards of ballads or hymns. While both neoclassical and popular genres persisted within the new print lyric, as Rowlinson has remarked, in the 19th c. “lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print.” In the titles of popular poetry volumes, lyric became the name for a generic alternative, as in Lays and Lyrics by Charles Gray (1841) or Legends and Lyrics by Adelaide Proctor (1863). These print uses of lyric shifted the sense of Lyrical Ballads (1798) or even of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) toward a simple noun that readers came to recognize. Both the expansion of lyric to describe all poetry in its ideal state and the shrinking of the term to fit print conventions and popular taste irked Poe, a writer always early to sense shifts or conflicts in the hist. of ideas. Before Whitman’s “lyric utterances” stretched poetry beyond form, Poe declared in “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) that “what we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones,” since “a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief.” Poe’s emphasis on an affective definition of form reached back to Longinus and echoed Coleridge, but it also proved influential for later 19th-c. theories of lyricism
eBook - PDFThe Advantage of Lyric
Essays on Feeling in Poetry
- Barbara Hardy(Author)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Bloomsbury Academic(Publisher)
Lyric poems often have the privacy of love-speech, but equally often the greater privacy of inner discourse. Reading and writing the poetry of feeling is plainly a valuable means of achieving what Proust speaks of as sentimental honesty. Some poetry has the melodramatic quality of attempts to stir feeling and sensation, but good poetry is not written out of this kind of imposed and strained (often well-meaning, but possibly dangerous) desire to move, but moves its readers by keeping its eye on the elucida-tion and development of feeling. This is not to expound a naturalistic doctrine: a love poem may or may not be written from actual feeling, but may assemble and imagine and create from the basis of real experi-ence. Perhaps the best discussion of feeling in poetry written since Coleridge is the prose discourse, 'Dichtung Und Wahrheit' in Auden's Homage to Clio, where Auden insists on the subjunctive mood of poetic passion: As an artistic language, Speech has many advantages—three persons, three tenses (Music and Painting have only the Present Tense) both the active and the passive mood—but it has one serious defect: it lacks the Indicative Mood. All its statements are in the subjunctive and only possibly true until verified (which is not always possible) by non-verbal evidence. There are many feelings which evaporate on being specified. Lyrical utterance makes feeling public, yet preserves a privacy in declining to furnish attendant circumstances. D. H. Lawrence speaks of the danger of pinning things down in fiction, of trying to make static what is trembling and irridescent. In Shakespeare's sonnet we follow the very track of feeling, moving through delicacy and strength, rational appraisal and irrational defiance at the end, sadness and exhilaration, gentleness and great pride, moth-like softness and a climax as passionate and affirmative as an embrace.
eBook - PDF- Nerys Williams(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- EUP(Publisher)
4 Following this Romantic precedent in considering the poets from the United Kingdom, USA, Jamaica and India, we will con-template how the personal lyric in contemporary poetry conveys subjective states of mind and how the personal poem adapts its NOT FOR DISTRIBUTION OR RESALE. FOR PERSONAL USE ONLY. lyric subjects 27 address. It is important to consider what happens to the poem when subjectivity is no longer represented as a stable voice. This destabilising of voice and persona in the poem is what the American poet Lyn Hejinian proposes as subjectivity that is less a fixed entity than ‘a mobile (and mobilized) reference point’. 5 TOWARDS A THEORY OF LYRIC EXPRESSION The lyric or personal poem is often considered as expressive, and the ‘expressive’ lyric posits the self as the primary organising principle of the work. Central to this model is the articulation of the subject’s feelings and desires, and a strongly marked division between subjectivity and its articulation as expression. M. H. Abrams identifies an expressive theory of the lyric poem as the internal made external: A work of art is essentially the internal made external, result-ing from a creative process operating under the impulse of feeling, and embodying a combined product of the poet’s perceptions, thoughts, and feelings. The primary source and subject matter of a poem therefore, are the actions and attributes of the poet’s own mind . . . The first test any poem must pass is no longer, ‘Is it true to nature?’ or ‘Is it appro-priate to the requirements either of the best judges or the generality of mankind?’ but a criterion looking in a different direction; namely ‘Is it sincere? Is it genuine?’ 6 Although Abrams has in mind primarily the poetry of the nine-teenth century, this model resonates as a general impulse in poetry from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, especially in its evocation of sincerity and authenticity.
eBook - PDF- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome J. McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry V. Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
They look to poetry for insights into the nature of human experience, and expect elevated thought in carefully wrought language. In contrast, other readers distrust poetry that seems moralistic or didactic. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote John Keats to his friend J.H. Reynolds; rather, poetry should be “great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” The American poet Archibald MacLeish took Keats’s idea a step further: in his poem “Ars Poetica” he suggested that “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish was not suggesting that a poem should lack meaning, but rather that meaning should inhere in the poem’s expressive and sensuous qualities, not in some explicit statement or versified idea. Whatever we look for in a poem, the infinitude of forms, styles, and subjects that make up the body of literature we call “poetry” is, in the end, impossible to capture in a definition that would satisfy all readers. All we can do, perhaps, is to agree that a poem is a discourse that is characterized by a heightened attention to language, form, and rhythm, by an expressiveness that works through figurative rather than literal modes, and by a capacity to stimulate our imagination and arouse our feelings. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY To speak of “the language of poetry” implies that poets make use of a vocabulary that is somehow different from the language of everyday life. In fact, all language has the capacity to be “poetic,” if by poetry we understand a use of language to which some special importance is attached. The ritualistic 1226 Reading Poetry utterances of religious ceremonies sometimes have this force; so do the skipping rhymes of children in the schoolyard.
- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Wendy Lee, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry Qualls, Jason Rudy, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
They look to poetry for insights into the nature of human experience, and expect elevated thought in carefully wrought language. In contrast, other readers distrust poetry that seems moralistic or didactic. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote John Keats to his friend J.H. Reynolds; rather, poetry should be “great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” The American poet Archibald MacLeish took Keats’s idea a step further: in his poem “Ars Poetica” he suggested that “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish was not suggesting that a poem should lack meaning, but rather that meaning should inhere in the poem’s expressive and sensuous qualities, not in some explicit statement or versified idea. Whatever we look for in a poem, the infinitude of forms, styles, and subjects that make up the body of literature we call “poetry” is, in the end, impossible to capture in a definition that would satisfy all readers. All we can do, perhaps, is to agree that a poem is a discourse that is characterized by a heightened attention to language, form, and rhythm, by an expressiveness that works through figurative rather than literal modes, and by a capacity to stimulate our imagination and arouse our feelings. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY To speak of “the language of poetry” implies that poets make use of a vocabulary that is somehow different from the language of everyday life. In fact, all language has the capacity to be “poetic,” if by poetry we understand a use of language to which some special importance is attached. The ritualistic utterances of religious ceremonies sometimes have this force; so do the skipping rhymes of children in the schoolyard. We can distinguish such uses of language from the kind of writing we find in, say, a
No longer available |Learn more- Joseph Black, Leonard Conolly, Kate Flint, Isobel Grundy, Don LePan, Roy Liuzza, Jerome McGann, Anne Lake Prescott, Barry Qualls, Claire Waters(Authors)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- Broadview Press(Publisher)
They look to poetry for insights into the nature of human experience, and expect elevated thought in carefully-wrought language. In contrast, other readers distrust poetry that seems moralistic or didactic. “We hate poetry that has a palpable design upon us,” wrote John Keats to his friend J.H. Reynolds; rather, poetry should be “great & unobtrusive, a thing which enters into one’s soul, and does not startle it or amaze it with itself but with its subject.” The American poet Archibald MacLeish took Keats’s idea a step further: in his poem “Ars Poetica” he suggested that “A poem should not mean / But be.” MacLeish was not suggesting that a poem should lack meaning, but rather that meaning should inhere in the poem’s expressive and sensuous qualities, not in some explicit statement or versified idea. Whatever we look for in a poem, the infinitude of forms, styles, and subjects that make up the body of literature we call “poetry” is, in the end, impossible to capture in a definition that would satisfy all readers. All we can do, perhaps, is to agree that a poem is a discourse that is characterized by a heightened attention to language, form, and rhythm, by an expressiveness that works through figurative rather than literal modes, and by a capacity to stimulate our imagination and arouse our feelings. THE LANGUAGE OF POETRY To speak of “the language of poetry” implies that poets make use of a vocabulary that is somehow different from the language of everyday life. In fact, all language has the capacity to be “poetic,” if by poetry we understand a use of language to which some special importance is attached. The ritualistic utterances of religious ceremonies sometimes have this force; so do the skipping rhymes of children in the schoolyard. We can distinguish such uses of language from the kind of writing we find in, say, a
eBook - PDF- Daniel Robinson(Author)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- Continuum(Publisher)
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH’S POETRY 28 WORDSWORTH’S FORMS: LYRIC AND BALLAD Wordsworth’s careful attention to form belies the misconception of his poetry as merely ‘the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling.’ Wordsworth, like many of the great poets who preceded him—Virgil, Ovid, Dante, Petrarch, Milton—had a keen under-standing of the relationship between poetic form and poetic fame. The poetry of ‘the great decade’ illustrates the competing claims upon him as he shaped a poetic identity, the tension between his enjoyment of writing in shorter lyric forms and his ambition to write longer, narrative works. Even the title Lyrical Ballads implies a principle that I elsewhere have called ‘formal paradoxy’ in the juxtaposition of two contrasting, even contra-dictory forms, the lyric and the ballad. The lyric is classical in origin, deriving from Greek songs sung to the accompaniment of a lyre; these are short poems that develop subjective themes, insights, emotions. The ballad has folk origins and is narrative; it tells a story in a rustic vernacular. Both forms take their origin in music and therefore rhyme (as songs today do). The ballad had become popular again with the publication in 1765 of Percy’s hugely successful Reliques of Ancient English Poetry . By the time Lyrical Ballads appeared the ballad was ubiquitous, so much so that Wordsworth, in the Preface, suggests that what ‘distin-guishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day’ is that they are ballads that are uniquely lyrical in the emphasis on the subjective experience of the speakers, who may or may not be adequate narrators: he explains that in Lyrical Ballads ‘the feel-ing therein developed gives importance to the action and situa-tion, and not the action and situation to the feeling’ ( LBRW 394–5). Plot is subordinate to lyrical insight, in other words. But also, as Paul Sheats suggests, plot is subordinate to the lyrical versatility of Wordsworth’s variously impassioned meters (185).
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