Everything about Lyric Poem totally explained
Lyric poetry refers to either poetry that has the form and musical quality of a song, or a usually short poem that expresses personal feelings, which may or may not be set to music.
Aristotle, in
Poetics, contrasted lyric poetry with
drama and
epic poetry. An example would be a poem that expresses feelings and may be a song that could be performed to an audience.
Forms
Although arguably the most popular form of lyric poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line
sonnet, either in its
Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a variety of forms.
Ballades and
villanelles are other forms of the lyric.
Ancient
Hebrew poetry relied on repetition, alliteration, and
chiasmus for many of its effects. Although much Greek and Roman classical poetry was written in forms with set meters and strophes,
Pindar's odes seem as formless to the ear accustomed to rhyme and meter as such modern poetry as
Rilke's
Duino Elegies.
In some cases, the form and theme are wed, as in the courtly love
aubade or dawn song in which lovers are forced to part after a night of love, often with the watchman's refrain telling them it's time to go.
A common feature of lyric forms is the
refrain, whether just one line or several, that ends or follows each strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with slight variation.
Meters
Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress. The most common meters are as follows:
- Iambic - two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable following the short or unstressed syllable.
- Trochaic - two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable following the long or stressed syllable.
- Anapestic - three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
- Dactylic - three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or unstressed.
Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.
Each meter can have any number of elements, called
feet. The most common meter in English is iambic pentameter, with five iambs per line. The most common in French is the
alexandrin, with twelve syllables. In English, the
alexandrine is iambic hexameter.
History of lyric poetry
The Classical period
Lyric poetry for the ancient Greeks had a precise and technical meaning: verse that was accompanied by the lyre. The lyric poet was classified as distinct from the writer of plays (which were spoken rather than sung), the writer of
trochaic and
iambic verses (which were recited), from the writer of
elegies (which were accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the writer of epics. The scholars of
Hellenistic Alexandria identified
nine lyric poets worthy of critical study. These
archaic Greek musician-poets included
Sappho,
Pindar,
Anacreon and
Alcaeus. The metrical forms characteristic of ancient Greek sung verse are
strophes,
antistrophes and
epodes. The Roman poet
Catullus was influenced by
Sappho as well as the
Neoteric poets who had turned away from
epic poetry to more personal themes.
Horace was another notable Roman poet.
In China, an anthology of poems by
Qu Yuan and
Song Yu.,
Songs of Chu, defined a new form of poetry that came from the area of
Chu during the
Warring States period. As a new literary style,
chu ci abandoned the classic four-character verses used in poems of
Shi Jing and adopted verses with varying lengths. This gave it more rhythm and latitude in expression.
Middle ages
Originating in
10th century Persian, a
ghazal is a
poetic form consisting of
couplets which share a
rhyme and a
refrain. Formally it consists of a short lyric composed in a single metre with a single rhyme throughout. The central subject is love. Notable exponents include:
Hafez,
Amir Khusro,
Auhadi of Maragheh,
Alisher Navoi,
Obeid e zakani,
Khaqani Shirvani,
Anvari,
Farid al-Din Attar,
Omar Khayyam, and
Rudaki.
Lyric in European literature of the medieval or Renaissance period means simply a poem which has been written to be set to music. A poem's particular structure, function or theme isn't specified by the term. The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created largely without reference to the classical past, by the pioneers of courtly poetry and
courtly love. The
troubadors, travelling composers and performers of songs, began to flourish during the
11th century and were often imitated in the 13th.
Trouvères were poet-composers who were roughly contemporary with and influenced by the troubadours but who composed their works in the northern
dialects of France. The first known
trouvère was
Chrétien de Troyes (
fl. 1160s-80s). The dominant form of German lyric poetry in the period was the
Minnesang, "a love lyric based essentially on a fictitious relationship between a knight and his high-born lady". Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, Minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition.
A
bhajan or
kirtan is a
Hindu devotional song. Bhajans are often simple
songs in lyrical language expressing emotions of love for the
Divine. Notable exponents include:
Kabir,
Surdas and
Tulsidas.
Hebrew singer-poets of the Middle ages include:
Yehuda Halevi,
Solomon ibn Gabirol and
Abraham ibn Ezra.
Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre from the
Jin Dynasty, 1115–1234, through the
Yuan Dynasty, (1271-1368), to the following
Ming period. Playwrights like
Ma Zhiyuan (c. 2170-1330) and
Guan Hanqing (c. 1300) were well-established writers of Sanqu Dramatic Lyrics. This poetry was composed in the vernacular or semi-vernacular.
In Italy,
Petrarch developed the sonnet form inherited from
Giacomo da Lentini and which Dante had widely used in his
Vita Nova . In
1327, the sight of a woman called Laura in the church of Sainte-Claire d'Avignon awoke in him a lasting passion, celebrated in the
Rime sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who copied Petrarch's style named this collection of 366 poems
Il Canzoniere ("Song Book"). The realistic presentation of Laura in his poems contrasts with the clichés of
troubadours and
courtly love.
Sixteenth century
Thomas Campion wrote
lute songs.
Sir Philip Sidney,
Edmund Spenser and
William Shakespeare helped popularize the sonnet.
In France,
La Pléiade aimed to break with earlier traditions of French poetry (especially
Marot and the
grands rhétoriqueurs), and, maintaining that French (like the Tuscan of
Petrarch and
Dante) was a worthy language for literary expression, to attempt to ennoble the French language by imitating the Ancients. Among the models favoured by the Pléiade were
Pindar,
Anacreon,
Alcaeus,
Horace and
Ovid. The forms that dominate the poetic production of these poets are the
Petrarchan
sonnet cycle and the
Horatian/
Anacreontic ode. The group included:
Pierre de Ronsard,
Joachim du Bellay and
Jean-Antoine de Baïf.
Spanish devotional poetry adapts the lyric for religious purposes. Notable poets include:
Teresa of Avila,
Saint John of the Cross,
Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz,
Garcilaso de la Vega,
Lope de Vega.
Seventeenth century
Lyric is the dominant poetic idiom in seventeenth century English poetry from
John Donne to
Andrew Marvell. The poems of this period are short, rarely tell a story and are intense in expression. Exceptions include the lyrics of
Robert Burns,
William Cowper,
Thomas Gray and
Oliver Goldsmith.
German lyric poets of the period include
Johann Wolfgang Goethe,
Novalis,
Friedrich Schiller,
Johann Heinrich Voß.
Kobayashi Issa is a Japanese lyric poet.
Nineteenth century
In Europe the lyric emerges as the principal poetic form of the nineteenth century, and comes to be seen as synonymous with poetry itself.
Romantic lyric poetry consists of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; feelings are extreme, but personal.
The traditional form of the sonnet is revived in Britain, with
William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet. Victorian lyric poets include
Alfred Lord Tennyson and
Christina Rossetti.
Lyric poetry was popular with the German reading public between 1830 and 1890, as shown in the number of poetry anthologies published in the period. According to
Georg Lukacs, the verse of
Joseph von Eichendorff exemplifies the German Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition, initiated by
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and
Johann Gottfried Herder and receiving new impetus with the publication of
Achim von Arnim and
Clemens Brentano's collection of Folk Songs,
Des Knaben Wunderhorn.
The nineteenth century in France sees a confident recovery of the lyric voice after its relative demise in the eighteenth century. The lyric becomes the dominant mode in French poetry of this period.
Charles Baudelaire is, for
Walter Benjamin, the last European example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale."
The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constitute the period of the rise of Russian lyric poetry, exemplified by
Aleksandr Pushkin. The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet,
Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems. Italian lyric poets of the period include
Ugo Foscolo,
Giacomo Leopardi,
Giovanni Pascoli and
Gabriele D'Annunzio. Japanese lyric poets include
Taneda Santoka,
Masaoka Shiki and
Ishikawa Takuboku. Spanish lyric poets include
Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer,
Rosalía de Castro and
José de Espronceda.
Twentieth century
In the early years of the twentieth century rhymed lyric poetry, usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in America, Europe and the
British colonies. The English
Georgian poets such as
A. E. Housman,
Walter de la Mare and
Edmund Blunden used the lyric form. The Bengali poet
Rabindranath Tagore was praised by
William Butler Yeats for his lyric poetry and compared with the troubadour poets, when the two met in 1912.
The relevance and acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question by
modernism, the growing mechanization of human experience and the harsh realities of war. After the
Second World War the form was again championed by the
New Criticism, and in the late twentieth century lyric once again became a mainstream poetic form.
Modernism
The dominance of lyric was challenged by American experimental modernists such as
Ezra Pound,
T. S. Eliot,
H.D. and
William Carlos Williams, who rejected the English lyric form of the nineteenth century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought.
Wallace Stevens and
Hart Crane, however, were modernists who also worked within the tradition of post-Romantic lyric poetry.
Defenders of lyric poetry in the early twentieth century saw it as an ally in the fight against mechanization, standardization and the commodification of human activities. The poetry of
Guillaume Apollinaire represents an alternative view, that mechanization could extend the repertoire of lyric poetry. The Irish poet
William Butler Yeats's work up to 1917 is predominantly dramatic and lyric love poetry, but after the
First World War he explores the political subjects of Irish independence, nationalism and civil war.
New Criticism
The American
New Criticism returned to the lyric in the 1950s, advocating a poetry that made conventional use of rhyme, meter and stanzas, and was modestly personal in the lyric tradition. Lyric poets consistent with the New Criticism ethos include
Robert Frost and
Robert Lowell. In the 1950s long personal epics, such as
Allen Ginsberg's
Howl were a reaction against the well-wrought short lyric of the New Criticism.
Confessional poetry
Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the late twentieth century, influenced by the
confessional poets of the 1950s and 60s, such as
Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton.
Other notable twentieth century lyric poets
Other notable twentieth century lyric poets include:
Robert Graves,
Geoffrey Hill,
Ted Hughes (UK),
P.K. Page,
George Bowering (Canada);
Paul Eluard,
Max Jacob,
Paul Valéry (France);
Gottfried Benn,
Paul Celan,
Stefan George,
Rainer Maria Rilke (Germany);
Yehuda Amichai,
Leah Goldberg (Israeli);
Eugenio Montale,
Giuseppe Ungaretti (Italy);
Czesław Miłosz (Poland);
Fernando Pessoa (Portugal);
Alexander Blok,
Anna Akhmatova,
Marina Tsvetaeva,
Osip Mandelstam,
Vladimir Mayakovsky,
Joseph Brodsky (Russia);
Rubén Darío(Nicaragua);
Federico García Lorca,
Antonio Machado (Spain),
Gabriela Mistral,
Pablo Neruda (Chile),
Octavio Paz (Mexico);
Nazim Hikmet (Turkey);
Jibanananda Das (Bengali).
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