Lyric poetry

Lyric poetry is among the most ancient forms of poetic expression. American poet Edward Hirsch in A Poet’s Glossary (2014) says that lyric poetry has been "practiced for at least forty-five hundred years." Originally intended to be sung—the term derives from the word "lyre," referring to an ancient Greek musical instrument—lyric poetry is characterized by a focus on emotion and expression of the poet’s personal feelings. In Anglo-American literary history, the popularity of the lyric has waxed and waned. In the eighteenth century, for example, the lyric fell out of favor because of a trend toward political poetry, whereas in the romantic period, with its emphasis on the subjective and the emotional, the lyric returned to prominence. Critics speak of the "lyricization" of poetry during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries when, for many, the term "poetry" became synonymous with lyric poetry.

Brief History

The lyric poem in ancient cultures, including Greek, Egyptian, and Hebrew, was often associated with religious experience, frequently an expression of celebration or mourning. In the Song of Miriam (Exodus 15:20–21), one of the oldest sections of the Hebrew Bible, Miriam leads a group of women in song and dance, praising Yahweh for giving victory over their enemies.

Aristotle (384–322 BCE) divided poetry into the categories epic, drama, and lyric, but gave the lyric short shrift in his discussion of poetry. However, history shows that the Greek lyric, a short song accompanied by a musical instrument, most often the lyre, was part of Greek life in many capacities. Although many Greek lyrics were composed for choral performance, the best known form is the monody, which was composed for a single performer. Among the best-known monodies are those by Sappho and Alcaeus. Roman lyric poets discarded the musical instrument but were influenced by the Greeks. Indeed, Horace may base his claim to be the first Roman lyric poet, thereby ignoring the poems of Catullus, because of his conscious imitation of Sappho and Alcaeus.

The troubadours, courtly singer-songwriters of twelfth-century southern France, introduced the concept of courtly love and invented poetic forms such as the sestina that poets still use. The Western lyric owes a large debt to these troubadours, who made romantic and erotic love a lyrical subject. Like the Greeks, these poets used musical accompaniment, although little is known about what instruments they played. Some scholars have speculated that it may have been as simple as a single lute, and others suggest accompaniment may have been a small band, complete with woodwinds, strings, and percussion.

Eventually, however, lyric poetry lost its musical aspect. In fourteenth-century Italy, Petrarch popularized the sonnet, which spread to other Western countries. In the sixteenth century, Sir Thomas Wyatt introduced the sonnet in England, and later in the century, the sonnet cycle attracted such major writers as Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser, and William Shakespeare. Seventeenth-century English poetry was dominated by the lyric. One of literary history’s richest and most experimental periods of lyric poetry, the century saw poets such as John Donne, Ben Johnson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, and Andrew Marvell crafting poems that would become classic examples of the lyric.

The development of the English lyric suffered during the eighteenth century, but early romantic poets such as William Blake, Robert Burns, and Thomas Gray anticipated another flourishing of the lyric form. In 1798, William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads and inaugurated the romantic period. The nineteenth century saw the lyric emerge as the dominant form of poetry throughout Europe. In England, at the beginning of the 1800s, Wordsworth and Coleridge published a second edition of Lyrical Ballads with a preface that included Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as a "spontaneous overflow of emotion," a phrase that would inspire lyric poets of future generations. The young romantics—Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and John Keats—added their voices to the chorus of lyric poets. In the United States, Ralph Waldo Emerson called for a national poet-seer who would speak for all, and just over a decade later, Walt Whitman answered with the first edition of Leaves of Grass (1855). At the same time, the reclusive Emily Dickinson was creating her fascicles, which finally saw publication in the 1890s. The two poets were major influences on future lyric poets in the United States and elsewhere.

Lyric Poetry Today

With the twentieth century came the rise of modernism, a movement hostile to the lyric and what modernists deemed its romantic excesses. T. S. Eliot, arguably the most important voice of modernism, placed himself in direct opposition to Wordsworth and Whitman in his influential essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" (1919). Eliot defined poetry as an escape from emotion and personality, arguing that poetry should be separate and distinct from the personality rather than an extension of it. Eliot’s friend and fellow shaper of modernism, Ezra Pound, described his short, early poems as "dramatic lyrics," but mainly focused on "persona poems," in which the speaker is a fictional character who clearly is not the same as the poet. In contrast, Wallace Stevens, another major figure of the period, had a romantic’s interest in reality perceived through the imagination of the poet, as such poems as "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" and "The Man with the Blue Guitar" demonstrate.

In the late 1950s and early 1960s, confessional poetry gained major attention through the work of poets such as Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, W. D. Snodgrass, and John Berryman. These poems were highly personal and often dealt with subjects such as death, sex, depression, and relationships, returning to a focus on the poet’s personality and feelings. The confessional poets were strong influences on poets who followed them, but younger poets also insisted on separation from the pioneers. Other contemporary poets extend the definition of the lyrical "I" and what is autobiographical in poetry, as demonstrated by Joan Aleshire’s claim that any poem is the product of the poet’s experiences and observations.

Bibliography

Baker, David, and Ann Townsend, eds. Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry. Minneapolis: Graywolf, 2007. Print.

Blasing, Mutlu Konuk. Lyric Poetry: The Pain and the Pleasure of Words. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007. Print.

Hirsch, Edward. A Poet’s Glossary. New York: Houghton, 2014. Print.

Johnson, W. R. The Idea of Lyric: Lyric Modes in Ancient and Modern Poetry. Berkeley: U of California P, 1982. Print.

O’Brien, Christine. The Romance of the Lyric in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Poetry: Experiments in Form. Newark: U of Delaware P, 2013. Print.

Sastri, Reena. "Louise Glück’s Twenty-First-Century Lyric." PMLA 129.2 (2014): 188–203. Print.

Shires, Linda M. "Hardy's Browning: Refashioning the Lyric." Victorian Poetry 50.4 (2012): 583–603. Print.

Stelzig, Eugene. "Lives without Narrative": Romantic Lyric as Autobiography." Wordsworth Circle 43.1 (2012): 56–58. Print.

Thain, Marion. The Lyric Poem: Formations and Transformations. New York: Cambridge UP, 2013. Digital file.

Warren, Rosanna. Fables of the Self: Studies in Lyric Poetry. New York: Norton, 2008. Print.