LYRIC
Lyric
poetry is a formal
type of poetry which expresses personal emotions or feelings, typically spoken
in the first person.[1] The term derives from a form of Ancient Greek literature, the lyric, which was defined by its musical
accompaniment, usually on a stringed instrument known as a lyre.[2] The term owes its importance in literary
theory to the division
developed by Aristotlebetween three broad categories of
poetry: lyrical, dramatic, and epic.
What is Lyric Poetry
A lyric poem is any
fairly short poem uttered by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or
a process of thought or feeling. Originally, the lyric was used to be sung to
the accompaniment of a lyre. The chief quality of a lyric poem is its emotional
intensity. It is a cry from the heart of joy, sorrow, surprise etc. As powerful
feelings are of short duration, the lyric is short. It is in fact, the purest
form of poetry. The lyric is usually personal i.e. the poet expresses his own
feelings in it. In beauty & variety of music, English lyric poetry is supreme.
Generally speaking, the
lyric poem has three parts-
1. In the first part, the theme is introduced.
2. In the second part, the theme is enlarged.
3. In the third part, the theme reaches its climax.
Spontaneity is an
important quality of a lyric poem. The poet sings effortlessly because of inner
urge for self-expression.
Characteristics
1. It expresses personal & emotional feelings
or thoughts.
2. It doesn’t tell a story.
3. It has song-like qualities.
4. It is usually short.
5. In olden days, it was sung with a lyre.
6. It always uses first person’s point of view.
Types
There are many different
types of lyric poem. A few examples are:
1. Love song
2. Patriotic song
3. Hymn
Introduction to Lyric Poetry
The most common form of poetry is the lyric poem. While
narrative poetry, including epics, convey a story, the lyric dramatizes an
emotional effusion, customarily filled with colorful images, metaphors, and
other poetic devices.
Origin of Lyric Poetry
Early dramatic productions for the Greek stage employed
the use a chorus, composed of speakers who explicated the movements of the
play, making the audience more aware of the action and its purpose. On
occasion, an individual from the chorus would perform a short piece
accompanying himself (no women appeared in early Greek plays) on the lyre; thus
the verse became known as "lyric."
Most of what we think of as poetry today is, in fact,
lyric poetry. The emphasis of most poetry, including political poetry, is on
emotion. The speaker of lyric poetry dramatizes his/her emotion which is often
highly personal and individual. Although a lyric poem might suggest a
storyline, its primary function is not on storytelling but on creating a drama
of human feeling.
Song
Lyric poetry features many subforms. The most subtle form
is the song. While many legitimate, literary quality songs are extant, most
popular songs of a society seldom attain that level of achievement. Popular
songs such as those made famous by popular singers are an integral and
important part of society, but they seldom rise to the level of expression of
true literature.
Some popular songs may make use of poetic devices,
usually very obvious ones such as exaggeration (hyperbole) in the "love
song." For example: the singer cannot live without the beloved; the singer
finds it hard to breathe in presence of the beloved—some such as that.
The words in a song are often called "lyrics";
however, the correct term is merely "lyric." The lyric to
"Stairway to Heaven," the lyric to "Morning Has Broken," —
not the lyrics to these songs. Obviously, the term "lyric" here
derives from the original term assigned to this type of emotionally effusive
poetry.
Sonnet
There are basically three styles of the poetic form known
as the sonnet: Italian (Petrarchan), English (Elizabethan or Shakespearean),
and American (Innovative).
The Italian (Petrarchan) sonnet features fourteen lines
in two stanzas: the octave with eight lines and the rime scheme of ABBAABBA and
the sestet with six lines and a varied rime scheme CDECDE, or CCDDEE. The
sonnet is named for the Italian poet Francesco Petrarch,(1304-1374), who
composed a sequence of 366 sonnets expressing his love for a woman named Laura,
who has never been definitively identified.
The English (Elizabethan or Shakespearean) sonnet also
features fourteen lines; however, it is separated into three quatrains and a
couplet; the traditional rime scheme of the English sonnet is ABABCDCDEFEFGG.
The sequence of 154 sonnets by William Shakespeare (Edward de Vere, 17th Earl of Oxford) became so influential that the style of sonnet now
bears the Shakespeare designation along with the country and queen who reigned
during the time the sonnets were composed.
A recent addition to sonnet styles is the American
(Innovative) sonnet. This sonnet while also featuring the traditional 14 lines
most often is free verse. When rime and any steady rhythm appear in style it is
usually quite by accident.
David
Humphreys (1752-1818) is credited
with the distinction of having been the first American sonneteer; however, he
followed closely the English form and therefore is not quite the Innovative
sonneteer of later Americans who have chosen that form.
Wanda
Coleman offers a useful example of
the American (Innovative) sonnet, with emphasis on Innovative and possibly
experimental.
Villanelle
A very popular form among poets, most of whom have tried
their hand at composing in the form with varied levels of success, the
villanelle displays in 19 lines with 5 tercets and a final quatrain.
The entire poem employs only two riming words that
complete the first and the third lines of each tercet and then appear in both
lines of the couplet.
Hymn and Chant
Hymns and chant are devotional songs directed to the
Divine for the purpose of deepening the singer's love and devotional awareness
of God. It is ironic that the lyric known as a hymn was originally meant to be
sung by the Greek chorus because the tradition Greek stage made a distinction
between what was lyric and what was choric.
Hymns are often fashioned into quatrains featuring a rime
scheme of ABCB or ABAB. A wildly popular contemporary hymn is Boberg and
Hughes'"How Great Thou Art." Even the king of rock and roll Elvis
Presley covered that hymn.
The chant usually focuses on one devotional aspect of the
Godhead and as it is repeated with ever more depth and fervor, it leads the
mind to a one pointed awareness of the Divine and the soul within.
Ode
The ode traditionally offers exaltation to its subject.
The poem concentrates on a single thematic frame to bestow upon its target
honor and veneration. The target subject of the ode is ordinarily an important
person, idea, or both. The idea of freedom has been the motivation for penning
odes down through the centuries. The ode displays in a rather formal and solemn
manner.
Odes come in three styles: 1. Pindaric, 2. Horation, 3.
Irregular or Modern. "Ode to the Confederate Dead" by Allen Tate exemplifies the modern ode.
Elegy
Similar to the ode, the elegy focuses on its subject in a
rather formal and solemn manner. A sampling of widely anthologized elegies are
Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" and Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd."
Versanelle
The term "versanelle" was coined by Linda Sue
Grimes for use in her poetry commentaries. The term is a conjoining of the
terms "verse" and "villanelle."
The versanelle is short, usually fewer than 15 lines. It
dramatizes its subject with colorful imagery and always offers an observation
about human behavior, quite often focusing on the negative behaviors of
humankind.
Stephen Crane's "The Wayfarer"
exemplifies the versanelle. Also the works of Malcolm M. Sedam demonstrate
a mastery of that form.
Other Lyric Forms
Occasional verse or vers de société as
well as the rondeau, and the rondel are all lyric in their poetic form. The
style known as "occasional" poetry dedicates itself to a special
historical or contemporary event.
Emma Lazarus's sonnet titled "The New Colossus"
is an "occasional" sonnet. Lazarus wrote that sonnet to assist in
raising funds to purchase the pedestal for the new statue (Statue of Liberty),
which was coming to the United States as a gift from France in 1886.
The rondeau features light verse employed for fanciful
subjects. It displays in 15 lines with lines 9 and 15 functioning as a refrain.
The rime scheme is AABBA AABC AABBAC.
Similar to the sonnet, the rondel features 13 or 14 lines
with a rime scheme ABBAABABABBAAB; it is likely that this form fits the French
language better than any others, especially English.
Most Poetry Lyric
While most classic poets have told stories in poems, they
have mostly told of their feelings toward the things in life. That is why most
of the poetry that has been encountered down from ancient times is essentially
lyric poetry.
Poets have combined lyric forms which results in the many
forms and styles of lyrics. Emily Dickinson employed the lyric form exclusively
as she often employed the style of a hymn.
Walt Whitman liked to focus his work through the elegy
with his sprawled out cataloguing of things and people and events.
The lyric has been the staple in the tool box of the
poet—even the narratives, it can be argued, feature many qualities of the
lyric, which offers such a wealth of possibilities.
Types of Lyric
There
are several types of lyric used in poems such as given below:
An
elegy is a mournful, sad, or melancholic poem or a song that expresses sorrow
for someone who has bee lost, or died. Originally, it followed a structure
using a meter alternating six foot and five foot
lines. However, modern elegies do not follow such a pattern, though the mood of
the poem remains the same.
- Ode
An
ode is a lyric poem that expresses intense feelings, such as love, respect, or
praise for someone or something. Like an elegy, an ode does not follow any
strict format or structure, though it uses refrains or repeated lines. It is
usually longer than other lyrical forms, and focuses on positive moods of life.
A
sonnet uses fourteen lines, and follows iambic pentameter with five pairs of accented and
unaccented syllables. The structure of a sonnet, with predetermined syllables
and rhyme scheme, makes it flow off the tongues of
readers in way similar way to a on song on the radio.
- Dramatic Monologue
A
dramatic monologue has theatrical quality, which means that the poem portrays a
solitary speaker communing with the audience, without any dialogue coming from other characters. Usually,
the speaker talks to a specific person in the poem.
- Occasional Poetry
Poets
write occasional poetry for specific occasions such
as weddings, anniversaries, birthdays, victories, and dedications, such as John
Dryden’s “Annus Mirabilis,” and Edmund Spencer’s “Epithalamion.”
Examples of
Lyric in Literature
Example #1: Italian Sonnet (by James
DeFord)
This is an example of
a sonnet, using fourteen lines with a metrical pattern of iambic pentameter. The poem is about feelings of love for a
beloved. It tells how it is worth staying with one another instead of leaving.
Example #2: Ode to the West Wind (by
Percy Bysshe Shelley)
This excerpt from an
ode demonstrates lyric This poem has fourteen lines, and is written in iambic
pentameter. Each stanza is divided into four tercets followed by
a couplet. The rhyme scheme form is terza rima. The mood has a
positive lyrical quality.
Example #3: My Last Duchess (by Robert
Browning)
This poem is a
dramatic monologue in which the Duke shows a portrait of his former wife to the
emissary through his point of view. In so doing, he reveals his position, his
jealous temperament, and excessive pride. This monologue also has a lyrical
quality found in its rhyme scheme.
Example #4: O Captain! My Captain (by
Walt Whitman)
This is the first
stanza of Whitman’s famous elegy. Notice its mood, which is somber, and filled
with intense sadness. Still, the words are giving melodic flow due to lyrical
quality.
Function
A lyrical poet
addresses his audience directly by portraying their state of mind or emotions.
That is why a lyrical poem expresses personal emotions of the poet. The themes
of lyrical poems are also emotional and lofty, enabling the readers to look
into the life of things deeply. That is why such poems have universal appeal,
because readers can relate their feelings with the poem.
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 short or unstressed syllable 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]
·
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.
History
Greece
For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had
a precise technical meaning: verse that was accompanied by a lyre, cithara, or barbitos. 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 of trochaic and iambic verses
(which were recited), the writer of elegies(accompanied by the flute, rather than the lyre) and the
writer of epic.[5] The
scholars of Hellenistic Alexandria created
a canon of nine lyric poets deemed especially worthy of critical study.
These archaic and classical musician-poets included Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon and Pindar. Archaic
lyric was characterized by strophic composition and live musical performance.
Some poets, like Pindar extended the metrical forms to a triad,
including strophe, antistrophe (metrically
identical to the strophe) and epode (whose form does not match that of
the strophe).[6]
Rome[edit]
Among the major extant Roman poets
of the classical period, only Catullus (N°
11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61) and Horace (Odes) wrote
lyric poetry, which however was no longer meant to be sung but instead read or
recited. What remained were the forms, the lyric meters of the Greeks adapted
to Latin. Catullus was influenced by both archaic and Hellenistic Greek
verse and belonged to a group of Roman poets called the Neoteroi ("New Poets") who
spurned epic poetry following the lead of Callimachus.
Instead, they composed brief, highly polished poems in various thematic and
metrical genres. The Roman love elegies of Tibullus, Propertius,
and Ovid (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 in elegiac couplets and
so were not lyric poetry in the ancient sense.[7]
China[edit]
During China's Warring States period, the Songs of Chu collected
by Qu Yuan and Song Yu defined
a new form of poetry that came from the exotic Yangtze Valley,
far from the Weiand Yellow River homeland
of the traditional four-character verses collected in the Book of Songs.
The varying forms of the new Chu ci provided more rhythm and
greater latitude of expression.[9]
Medieval verse[edit]
Originating in
10th-century Persian, a ghazal is a poetic form consisting
of couplets that
share a rhyme and
a refrain. Formally,
it consists of a short lyric composed in a single meter with a single rhyme
throughout. The central subject is love. Notable authors include Hafiz, Amir Khusro, Auhadi of Maragheh, Alisher Navoi, Obeid e zakani, Khaqani Shirvani, Anvari, Farid al-Din Attar, Omar Khayyam,
and Rudaki. The ghazal was
introduced to European poetry in the early 19th century by the Germans Schlegel, Von
Hammer-Purgstall, and Goethe, who called Hafiz his "twin".[10]
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.[11] The
lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created by the pioneers of courtly
poetry and courtly love largely without reference to the classical past.[12] The troubadors, 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 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".[13] Initially
imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, minnesang soon
established a distinctive tradition.[13] There
was also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese
lyric.[14] Hebrew singer-poets
of the Middle Ages included Yehuda Halevi, Solomon ibn Gabirol, and Abraham ibn Ezra.
In Italy, Petrarch developed
the sonnet form
pioneered by Giacomo da Lentini and Dante's Vita 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 the Rime
sparse ("Scattered rhymes"). Later, Renaissance poets who
copied Petrarch's style named this 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.
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
authors include Kabir, Surdas, and Tulsidas.
Chinese Sanqu poetry was a Chinese poetic genre popular from the
12th-century Jin Dynasty through to the early Ming. Early
14th-century playwrights like Ma Zhiyuan and Guan Hanqing were
well-established writers of Sanqu. Against the usual tradition of using Classical Chinese,
this poetry was composed in the vernacular.[15]
16th century[edit]
In 16th-century
Britain, Thomas Campion wrote lute songs and Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser,
and William Shakespeare popularized the sonnet.
In France, La Pléiade—including Pierre de Ronsard, Joachim du Bellay,
and Jean-Antoine de Baïf—aimed to break with earlier traditions of French
poetry—particularly Marot and
the grands rhétoriqueurs—and
began imitating classical Greek and Roman forms
such as the odes. Favorite
poets of the school were Pindar, Anacreon, Alcaeus, Horace, and Ovid. They also produced Petrarchan sonnet cycles.
Spanish devotional poetry
adapted the lyric for religious purposes. Notable examples were Teresa of Ávila, John of the Cross, Sor Juana Inés de
la Cruz, Garcilaso de la
Vega, and Lope de Vega.
Although better known for his epic Os Lusíadas, Luís de Camões is
also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period.
In Japan, the naga-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.
17th century[edit]
Lyrical poetry was the
dominant form of 17th-century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew Marvell.[16] The
poems of this period were short. Rarely narrative, they tended towards intense
expression.[16] Other
notable poets of the era include Ben Jonson, Robert Herrick, George Herbert, Aphra Behn, Thomas Carew, John Suckling, Richard Lovelace, John Milton, Richard Crashaw,
and Henry Vaughan. A German lyric poet of the period is Martin Opitz; in
Japan, this was the era of the noted haiku-writer Matsuo Bashō.
18th century[edit]
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.[17] Exceptions
include the lyrics of Robert Burns, William Cowper, Thomas Gray,
and Oliver Goldsmith. German lyric poets of the period include Johann Wolfgang
von Goethe, Novalis, Friedrich Schiller, and Johann Heinrich Voß. Kobayashi Issa was
a Japanese lyric poet during this period. In Diderot's Encyclopédie, 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".[18]
19th century[edit]
In Europe, the lyric emerged
as the principal poetic form of the 19th century and came to be seen as
synonymous with poetry.[19] Romantic lyric
poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a
specific moment; the feelings were extreme but personal.[20]
The traditional sonnet was
revived in Britain, with William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet.[19] Other
important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron. Later in the century, the Victorian lyric was more linguistically self-conscious and
defensive than the Romantic forms had been.[21] Such
Victorian lyric poets include Alfred Lord Tennysonand 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.[22] According
to Georg Lukács, the verse of Joseph von
Eichendorff exemplified the German
Romantic revival of the folk-song tradition
initiated by Goethe, Herder, and Arnim and Bretano's Des Knaben
Wunderhorn.[23]
France also saw a revival of
the lyric voice during the 19th century.[24] The
lyric became the dominant mode of French poetry during this period.[25]For Walter Benjamin, Charles Baudelaire was the last example of lyric poetry "successful
on a mass scale" in Europe.[26]
In Russia, Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified a rise of
lyric poetry during the 18th and early 19th centuries.[27] The
Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and
their chief poet Per Daniel
Amadeus Atterbom produced many
lyric poems.[28] Italian
lyric poets of the period include Ugo Foscolo, Giacomo Leopardi, Giovanni Pascoli,
and Gabriele D'Annunzio. Spanish lyric poets include Gustavo Adolfo
Bécquer, Rosalía de Castro,
and José de Espronceda. Japanese lyric poets include Taneda Santoka, Masaoka Shiki, and Ishikawa Takuboku.
20th century[edit]
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,[29] 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; Yeats compared him to the
troubadour poets when the two met in 1912.[30]
The relevance and
acceptability of the lyric in the modern age was, though, called into question
by modernist poets such as Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, H.D., and William 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.[31] After
World War II, the American New 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.[32] Lyric
poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life constituted the new
mainstream of American poetry in the late 20th century following the confessional poets of the 1950s and ’60s such as Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.[33]
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