Lyric poetry

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Lyric poetry takes its name from a seven-stringed instrument. The Greeks played a professional-grade lyre called the kithara, and the word lyric descends from it. Today the term describes a formal kind of poem that expresses personal emotion, typically in a first-person voice. Song lyrics carry the same name, yet the three uses are not equivalent. Ancient Greek lyric was mostly chanted, and modern song lyrics only often work in the lyric mode. It is also one of the earliest forms of literature. How did the word for an instrument end up labeling a poem of private feeling? Why did the form rule some centuries and nearly fade in others? And who kept deciding what a lyric ought to be?

  2516

• 2. The Beat Beneath

  ›

  Two short syllables or one long syllable counted as equal in the meters behind much lyric poetry. Those meters rest on either syllables or stress. Song lyrics needed that regularity so the words could fit interchangeable tunes that followed a standard rhythmic pattern. Much modern lyric poetry is no longer sung, yet the rhythmic forms have outlived the music.

  Iambic meter, two syllables with the stress on the second, is the first of six common patterns. Trochaic meter reverses the order, and in English it turns up almost entirely in lyric poetry. Pyrrhic meter is two unstressed syllables, while spondaic meter is two stressed syllables in a row. Anapestic meter runs three syllables, with two unstressed before the stressed one. Dactylic meter flips that, placing one stressed syllable ahead of two unstressed ones. Some forms mix several meters, and they often give the refrain a different meter from the rest.

  36

• 3. Ancient Voices

  ›

  Aristotle divided poetry into three broad categories: lyrical, dramatic, and epic. That split is the reason the lyric matters so much in literary theory. For the ancient Greeks the word was strict. It meant verse accompanied by a lyre, a cithara, or a barbitos. Because such verse was sung, it was also called melic poetry. The lyric poet stood apart from the playwright, though Athenian drama still included choral odes in lyric form. Writers of trochaic and iambic verses, which were recited, formed another group. So did the elegists, whose accompaniment was the flute rather than the lyre. Scholars in Hellenistic Alexandria drew up a canon of nine lyric poets worthy of close study. Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar were among them. Archaic lyric was marked by strophic composition and live music. Pindar stretched his odes into a triad of strophe, antistrophe, and epode. The antistrophe repeated the strophe's metrical form exactly, while the epode did not match it.

  Only Catullus and Horace, among the major surviving Roman poets of the classical period, wrote lyric poetry. Catullus's lyrics include Carmina 11, 17, 30, 34, 51 and 61, and Horace's are his Odes. Roman lyric was read or recited rather than sung, so what remained were the forms: Greek lyric meters adapted to Latin. Catullus drew on both archaic and Hellenistic Greek verse. He belonged to the Neoteroi, or "New Poets", who spurned epic poetry following the lead of Callimachus. They wrote brief, highly polished poems in a range of themes and meters. The love elegies of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, including Ovid's Amores and Heroides, may be the ancestor of much later lyric. Yet they used elegiac couplets, so they were not lyric in the ancient sense.

  During China's Warring States period, Qu Yuan and Song Yu collected the Songs of Chu. These poems came from the exotic Yangtze Valley, far from the Wei and Yellow River homeland of the traditional four-character verses in the Book of Songs. The new form, called Chu Ci, varied widely, with more rhythm and greater latitude of expression.

  25678

• 4. Ghazal and Hymn

  ›

  In the 10th century, Persian poets originated the ghazal, a short lyric made of couplets that share a rhyme and a refrain. It keeps a single meter and a single rhyme throughout, and its subject is love. Hafiz, Omar Khayyam, Rudaki, Farid al-Din Attar, Amir Khusro, and Alisher Navoi are among its notable authors. The Germans Schlegel, Von Hammer-Purgstall, and Goethe introduced the ghazal to European poetry in the early 19th century. Goethe called Hafiz his "twin".

  Kabir, Surdas, and Tulsidas are notable authors of the bhajan or kirtan, a Hindu devotional song. Bhajans are often simple songs in lyrical language that express love for the Divine.

  Chinese sanqu poetry was a genre popular from the 12th-century Jin Dynasty through to the early Ming. Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing, playwrights of the early 14th century, were well-established writers of it. Against the usual tradition of Classical Chinese, sanqu was composed in the vernacular.

  89

• 5. Courtly Voices

  ›

  Toward the end of the 11th century, the troubadours began to flourish. These travelling composers and performers of songs were imitated in the centuries that followed. Together with other pioneers of courtly poetry and courtly love, they created European lyric largely without looking to the classical past. In this period the word lyric meant a poem written so it could be set to music, whether or not it ever was. Structure, function, and theme could all vary.

  The trouvères were poet-composers roughly contemporary with the troubadours and influenced by them, but they wrote in the northern dialects of France. The first known trouvère was Chrétien de Troyes, active in the 1160s-80s. In German lands the dominant form was minnesang, described as "a love lyric based essentially on a fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady." It began by imitating the troubadours and trouvères, then soon established a distinctive tradition. A large body of Galician-Portuguese lyric also existed in the period. Yehuda Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Abraham ibn Ezra were among the Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle Ages.

  In 1327, according to Petrarch himself, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke a lasting passion in him. He celebrated it in the Rime sparse, or "Scattered rhymes", building on the sonnet form pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante's Vita Nuova. Later Renaissance poets who copied his style named the 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.

  1011121331

• 6. Sonnets and Short Songs

  ›

  In 16th-century Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs, while Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare popularized the sonnet. In France, a group called La Pléiade set out to break with earlier French poetry, particularly Marot and the grands rhétoriqueurs. Its members included Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay, and Jean-Antoine de Baïf. They imitated classical Greek and Roman forms such as the ode, and they also produced Petrarchan sonnet cycles. Their favorite poets were Pindar, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Horace, and Ovid.

  Spanish devotional poets such as Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz adapted the lyric for religious purposes. Luís de Camões is better known for his epic Os Lusíadas, yet he is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period. In Japan the naga-uta, or "long song", was a popular lyric poem. It alternated five-syllable and seven-syllable lines and ended with an extra seven-syllable line.

  From John Donne to Andrew Marvell, lyrical poetry dominated English verse in the 17th century. The poems of the period were short, rarely narrative, and tended toward intense expression. Ben Jonson, George Herbert, Aphra Behn, and John Milton were among the other notable poets of the era. Martin Opitz wrote German lyric in this period, and Matsuo Bashō was the noted haiku-writer of Japan.

  In the 18th century, lyric poetry declined in England and France. The literary discussion of English coffeehouses and French salons was not congenial to it. Robert Burns, William Cowper, Thomas Gray, and Oliver Goldsmith were exceptions. German lyric poets of the period included Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Heinrich Voß, and Kobayashi Issa wrote in Japan. Louis chevalier de Jaucourt, in Diderot's great French reference work, described the lyric as "a type of poetry totally devoted to sentiment; that's its substance, its essential object".

  141516310

• 7. The Lyric Century

  ›

  By the 19th century, the lyric had emerged in Europe as the principal poetic form and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry. Romantic lyric poetry gave first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment. The feelings were extreme but personal. In Britain the traditional sonnet was revived, and William Wordsworth wrote more of them than any other British poet. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron were other important Romantic lyric writers. The Victorian lyric of Alfred Lord Tennyson and Christina Rossetti was more linguistically self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic forms had been.

  Between 1830 and 1890, lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public, as the number of poetry anthologies published in those years shows. According to Georg Lukács, the verse of Joseph von Eichendorff exemplified the German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition. Goethe, Herder, and the collection Des Knaben Wunderhorn by Arnim and Brentano had initiated that revival.

  In Russia, Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified a rise of lyric poetry across the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement, and their chief poet, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom, produced many lyric poems. Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli, and Gabriele D'Annunzio were Italian lyric poets of the period. Spain offered Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro, and José de Espronceda. Jacint Verdaguer and Miquel Costa i Llobera wrote in Catalan, and Taneda Santoka, Masaoka Shiki, and Ishikawa Takuboku wrote in Japan.

  In France, the lyric became the dominant mode of poetry during the 19th century. For Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire was the last example in Europe of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale".

  1718192021

• 8. Modern Doubts

  ›

  In 1912, William Butler Yeats met the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, praised his lyric poetry, and compared him to the troubadour poets. In those early years of the 20th century, rhymed lyric poetry expressing the poet's feelings was the dominant form in the United States, 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.

  Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and William Carlos Williams questioned whether the lyric still belonged in the modern age. They rejected the English lyric form of the 19th century. In their view it relied too heavily on melodious language rather than complexity of thought.

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

  In the middle of the 20th century, lyric poetry about relationships, sex, and domestic life became the new mainstream of American poetry. The confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, including Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, led the way. Other movements followed: the Black Mountain movement with Robert Creeley, Organic Verse with Denise Levertov, and projective verse, or "open field" composition, with Charles Olson. Language Poetry aimed at extreme minimalism, and many other experimental verse movements arrived before the century ended. Today the question of what counts as poetry, lyrical or otherwise, is still debated, now in the context of hypertext and multimedia on the Internet.

  27262829