Lyric poetry

lyric poetry

1. Greek. Lyric poetry, meaning poetry ‘sung to the lyre’, existed in Greece from earliest times. Although it was, strictly speaking, song, the words were of primary importance and are now all that remain, knowledge of the accompanying music having been lost in antiquity. The Alexandrian scholars of the third century BC drew up a canon of nine great lyric poets: Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Simonidēs, Pindar, and Bacchylidēs. Some added a tenth, Corinna. Lyric poetry is also found in the Attic drama of the fifth century BC, in the choruses (so called; see CHORUS), but towards the end of the fifth century the chorus was relegated to a subordinate role (see COMEDY, GREEK 5). In relatively modern times, Greek lyric poetry outside drama has been divided into two kinds, choral lyric (also known as choral odes) and monody (Gk. monōdia, ‘solo song’). Both kinds of lyric were written in a great variety of metres; for examples of possible kinds see METRE, GREEK 8. Elegy and iambic poetry, written in their own particular (non-lyric) metres, are both occasionally included with lyric poetry (strictly speaking erroneously and despite incompatibility of metre) when the subject-matter seems to suggest this grouping.

Choral lyric was sung (and often danced) by a chorus (or by a leader answered by a chorus) to a musical accompaniment usually played on the lyre, occasionally on the flute (aulos, a wind instrument like the oboe). It was composed from earliest times and throughout Greek history for public religious ceremonies. To this fact are attributable the predominantly elevated tone and the inclusion of myth and moralizing. Homer mentions many varieties of choral lyric: dirges, hymns, hyporchemata, maiden-songs (see PARTHENEION), and wedding-songs (see EPITHALAMIUM and HYMENAEUS). The procession-song (prosodion) is another very ancient form. Later developments were the dithyramb (accompanying the worship of Dionysus), the nome, and the encomium and epinikion, the two last written in praise of men, and indicative of the increasing secularization of this form of poetry. The earliest choral ode of which a substantial part survives is a partheneion by Alcman (seventh century BC) which seems to be composed in metrically corresponding stanzas known as strophēs and antistrophēs. In later choral lyric the form became triadic (see TRIAD), reputedly the innovation of Stesichorus, and of an increasing metrical complexity which reached its culmination in the odes of Pindar. The material of a choral ode was relatively standardized and included praise of the gods, mention of the occasion and the personalities involved, moral maxims, and mythical narrative, this last providing the main subject-matter.

The development of choral lyric is associated with the Doric-speaking Peloponnese, especially Sparta, and with the names of Thaletas, Eumelus, and Arion, whose works are all but lost. The association is indicated by the ancient convention that choral lyric was written in the Doric dialect; Doric elements were retained even in the choral lyric of Attic tragedy. The great poets of choral lyric, some of whose works survive, are Alcman, Stesichorus, Ibycus, Simonides, Pindar, and Bacchylides. For choral lyric as an element in Attic drama see CHORUS, TRAGEDY 1, and COMEDY, GREEK 2.

Of monody relatively little survives. It was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. The intimate nature of the subject matter—friendship, love, and hate—suggests that it was performed by a single individual on private occasions, for example after a banquet among friends (see SYMPOSIUM and SCOLIA). The surviving lyric of Sappho, Alcaeus, and Anacreon is mostly monody. The fact that a poem is triadic in form is usually taken as an indication that it is a choral rather than a monodic ode; monody is generally simpler than choral lyric in form, metre, and expression. Attic tragedy contains a small amount of monody in the lyrics occasionally sung by individuals (rather than by the chorus). See also ARCHILOCHUS.

2. Latin. Comparatively little lyric poetry was written by the Romans. There exist in Latin some fragments of folksongs, hymns, and religious incantations which indicate the existence in early times of an indigenous lyric poetry, but the earliest Latin lyric deserving of the name was modelled on Greek forms, mostly the simpler forms of monody, and it was entirely a literary product, not rooted in social practice, and intended to be read and not sung. Two notable exceptions are, first, the maiden-song composed for Juno at a time of crisis in 207 BC by Livius Andronicus, based presumably on Greek models; and secondly, Horace's elegant Carmen Saeculare (17 BC). Laevius was another early writer of lyrics (probably at the beginning of the first century BC), but only fragments of his work have survived. The two chief writers of literary lyric were Catullus and Horace. Catullus experimented with lyric metres in poems of great verve (11, 17, 30, 34, 51, and 61), and wrote other equally lively poems in hendecasyllables and scazons (see METRE, LATIN 3 (iii)) which it is natural to regard as lyrics, even if the metres are not strictly speaking those of song (see 1 above); their style and subject-matter both recall the manner of Greek monody. Horace in the Odes uses a fair variety of lyric metres found in Greek monody, frequently combining lines of different metres into couplets or four-line stanzas; he also expresses a range of sentiments, from deep seriousness in Pindaric vein (though not attempting the complexities of Pindar's triadic structure), to love poems and drinking songs in a more subjective style (exquisite, but lacking the spontaneity of Greek monody). The iambic metres of the Epodes (see ODES) do not strictly belong to lyric, although the subject-matter in most cases makes them close to it. Horace's technical mastery seems to have deterred later poets from attempting to follow him, and lyrical subjects tended to be treated in the elegiac metre. Statius' Silvae include two lyrics (4. 5 and 4. 7), Martial occasionally used lyric metres, and Seneca (2) included choral lyrics in his tragedies. The note of true inspiration is not heard again until the Christian hymns of Prudentius and Ambrose (to which should perhaps be added the emperor Hadrian's poem to his soul).

Medieval

a. General Characteristics. The term ‘lyric’, although widely used today to refer to a particular tradition of French poetry in the Middle Ages, was not available to medieval poets; they deploy instead a range of more or less precise generic terms to designate a wide range of compositions which tend to be short, strophic, sung to music, and organized around a first-person voice, and which deal prominantly (though by no means exclusively) with the theme of love. Terms such as vers (in Occitan) or chanson in French have a relatively unspecific meaning. Some medieval terms (such as sirventes) designate content primarily, since sirventes are often formal imitations (contrafacta) of existing love songs. Others (such as jeu parti) are mainly formal: a great variety of topics are debated in these texts, it is the debate form itself which defines the genre. Yet others (such as alba, the dawn song) highlight both narrative content (lovers' separation at dawn) and a characteristic formal feature (a refrain word, alba). The analysis of medieval lyric poetry cannot straightforwardly assume the priority of either substantive or formal characteristics.

A typological distinction which has proved useful is that between ‘aristocratic’ (aristocratisant) and ‘popularizing’ registers, elaborated by Pierre Bec. By ‘register’ here is meant a common store of potential constituents for a song of a particular type: characteristic motifs, phraseology, verse forms, and so on. The ‘popularizing register’ comprises lyric verse with a narrative cast like the alba or the pastourelle; verses apparently conceived as dance-tunes, such as the estampie or the rondeau; verses incorporating ‘popular’ refrains; first-person songs in a woman's voice (chansons de femme, chansons de toile, chansons de mal-mariée); comic or burlesque songs—any song, in short, which does not share the perspective of a courtly male speaker. ‘Aristocratic’ genres include love songs (cansos in Occitan, the grand chant courtois in French); reflective, moral, religious, or political songs using similar forms (e.g. sirventes, songs to the Virgin such as those by Gautier de Coinci, and crusade songs); and the debate genres. The terms ‘popularizing’ and ‘aristocratic’ do not imply the expected social class of either composer or audience. Both ‘aristocratic’ and ‘popularizing’ songs can be ascribed to the same poet, such as Thibaut de Champagne. And poets who emerge from the towns or from clerical milieux, rather than from the aristocracy, such as Adam de la Halle, may compose ‘aristocratic’ songs.

This distinction becomes less helpful in the later Middle Ages, with the rise of a new kind of poetic voice: that of the clerk, in the sense the term had in the Middle Ages, when it designates not so much a cleric as a scholar and intellectual. With such figures as Rutebeuf and Machaut the writer's craft becomes an important component of the lyric. Formal skill, developed in the formes fixes (such as the ballade or virelai), becomes an index less of inherent refinement (as in earlier ‘aristocratic’ song) than of writerly achievement. Music remains an important element of lyric composition (notably in the case of Machaut, celebrated as a composer and musical innovator) [see Words And Music, I]. But after Machaut lyric poetry tends to be increasingly divorced from music and inserted into other written texts, such as dits. Thus Villon, for example, inserted 19 lyric pieces of various genres into his Grand Testament. Musicality comes to be regarded as an inherent trait of poetry which no longer needs the addition of a musical accompaniment; thus Deschamps's Art de dictier (1392) emphasizes the ‘musique naturelle’ of verse in opposition to the ‘musique artificielle’ of music, an idea repeated as late as Molinet's Art de rhétorique (1492).

b. Before 1300. Despite the difficulties of classification, and hence of generalization, lyric poetry to the end of the 13th c. tends to be thought of as dominated by the love song (canso or grand chant courtois), even though this makes up less than half of the surviving texts, because so many other genres (especially the ‘aristocratic’ ones) are formal calques of it. In this period, text and music seem to have been closely associated. Poets (troubadours in Occitan, trouvères in northern French) were also composers, and their songs were composed in strophes, each of which, in any song, shared the same metrical structure and thus could be sung to the same tune. (One genre, the descort, is defined by the fact that it flouts this convention and gives each successive stanza a different metrical shape). In the love song, both metre and tune were usually unique to their particular song. This gave an especial prominence to the opening stanza, which often contains the most striking imagery, or the most dramatic claims, of the whole song. In subsequent stanzas, form and tune are recapitulated and the content elaborated, but with the exception of a few poets (Bernart de Ventadorn, Thibaut de Champagne) the central part of the song is not made the occasion for rhetorical display. Instead, poetic energy is gathered for the end, often a direct request for love or action, which may be expressed in the final stanza and/or in a partial stanza, termed a tornada in Occitan, an envoi in French, soliciting the favour of the poem's addressee (s).

Composed to be sung, and presumably usually sung from memory without the support of a written text, the opening and, to a lesser extent closing stanzas are those whose position is most fixed. Intermediate stanzas appear in different manuscript copies with a considerable variety of orderings, and sometimes stanzas are omitted or interpolated. The close correspondence between melody and metre was probably a useful mnemonic. But the rhyme scheme of a lyric does not necessarily correspond with its musical form; and it far oustrips the requirements of a memory-aid. Rhyme schemes are sometimes so intricate and the rhyme words so unusual as to be a song's principal form of ornament. Rather than the rhymes conforming to the music, the music is made to serve and enhance the rhymes, protracting the rhyme syllable with elegant swirls of notes (melismata).

The content of love songs in this period rehearses the paradoxes of fin'amor. The first-person singer represents his feelings as simultaneously worthy and transgressive. He loves a lady, but often assimilates her, by the use of feudal imagery, to a man. Other paradoxes abound. A singer professes to sing under the compulsion of personal feeling, but also in the hope of pleasing a lady or patron. A song is both new and traditional, conventional and sincere. The formal exquisiteness of the lyric is therefore made to house, and hold in balance, a set of tensions and contradictions which yield interesting reflections on conceptions of the self, the social, and the relation of sentiment to language.

Northern French trouvères who begin their songs with professions of sincerity and novelty are being particularly disingenuous, since so many of their songs follow the form and phraseology of Occitan models. Lyric poetry had become a prestige medium and the lyric subject is characterized in terms similar to a hero of romance. The desire these texts express can be seen as the desire to be the subject of a lyric, rather than to succeed in whatever the ostensible theme of a song might be. When, from the end of the 13th c. onwards, new forms such as the ballade and the virelai rise to prominence, this sense of participating in a literary tradition increases rather than diminishes.

c. Later Middle Ages. The poets of the 14th and 15th c. take this process a stage further: the desire of Machaut, Charles d'Orléans, or Villon could be said to be the subject not just of the lyric but of the œuvre. It is characteristic of these writers that, like Machaut, they should be concerned with the materiality of their production: its copying, its anthologization, the disposition of stanza and line on the page itself; that they should wish, like Deschamps or Molinet, to analyse and codify the very essence of the lyric project; that they should show a predilection for the more weighty, flamboyantly difficult verse-forms such as the lai or the complainte. Technical virtuosity foregrounds and solemnizes the poetic je, its conflicting impulses dramatized through allegorical figures in the wake of the Roman de la Rose, or through exteriorizations of a fragmented self such as Cœur, Penser, or Corps. The poet's analysis is directed inwards (Christine de Pizan's widowhood; Machaut's mildly ironic old man's passion in the Voir Dit) or conscious of a political and social mission (Deschamps's vituperative counterpoint to the vices of his time; Alain Chartier's sonorous denunciations of the princes of France). The poet, in other words, is not a mere entertainer, but a person of substance whose self merits examination and whose opinions have weight.

This shift in perspective—from periphery of court life to centre of the moral universe—characterizes the Rhétoriqueurs, officially constituted court poets par excellence, whose words are designed to be in themselves a memorial of those whom they serve, and demand, therefore, a maximum of poetic sophistication. To display learning, to manipulate an elegant allegory, to multiply linguistic and prosodic virtuosities, is to attach to poetry all the solemnity of their official verse.

[Sarah Kay and Jane Taylor]

Bibliography

• D. Poirion, L'Évolution du lyrisme courtois de Guillaume de Machaut à Charles d'Orléans (1965)
• P. Bec, La Lyrique française au Moyen Âge: contribution à une typologie des genres poétiques, 2 vols. (1977-8)

Modern

a. Renaissance. The domination of 16th-c. French poetry by the Pléiade should not be allowed to obscure the talents of its immediate predecessors. Clément Marot still belongs to the medieval tradition, cultivating the stylistic complexity of the Rhétoriqueurs, but his later verse epistles show an elegant badinage and his biblical paraphrases an unadorned lyric vigour which are humanist. Neoplatonic and Petrarchan influences are first felt in the work of the Lyon poets, particularly in Scève's Délie. But Scève's restrained, hermetic art has little in common with the searing passion of Louise Labé's sonnets. The object of Labé's unrequited love is assumed to be Olivier de Magny, whose poems of spiritual exile in Rome, Soupirs, pre-date Du Bellay's similar Regrets by a year. The link between the Lyon school and the Pléiade is provided by Pontus de Tyard, who, with Jodelle, Peletier du Mans, Baïf, Belleau, Du Bellay, and Ronsard, makes up the constellation. The ‘programme’ of these poets enjoins a thoroughgoing imitation of classical models (hence Baïf's attempts to introduce quantitative principles into French verse). The immediate successor of the Pléiade was the proto-précieux Desportes, whose detached urbanity sets him far apart from the rough-hewn, tumultuous commitment of contemporary Protestant poets, such as Du Bartas, d' Aubigné, and Sponde.

b. Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries. Malherbe presides over the poetry of the first decades of the 17th c. as its brusque lawgiver: precision of language, fixity of caesura, prohibition of hiatus, chevilles, and commonplace rhymes, semantic integrity of stanzas—in short, poetic intensity through formal rigour and linguistic spareness. Malherbe's theories are only available in his Commentaires sur Desportes and the account of his disciple Racan, who with his master and Mainard represented a tendency firmly resisted by Régnier and Théophile de Viau. These poets worked to reinstate the claims of spontaneous inspiration, decoration, and a syntax and diction freely conceived. With the development of the salons and of preciosity, poetry became the preserve of a social élite set on refining feelings and language to a paroxysm of exquisiteness. Voiture was the ‘court poet’ of the Hôtel de Rambouillet, and his entourage included Benserade, Gombauld, and Malleville. Independent of the cult of preciosity, but not untouched by it, were the ‘baroque’ poets Tristan l'Hermite and Saint-Amant, who excelled in the burlesque. A much sterner enemy of the précieux was Boileau, who championed Malherbe's classical principles; but Boileau's reputation is also founded on his Juvenalian Satires, his mock-epic Le Lutrin, and his Horatian Épîtres. By Boileau's standards, the vers libres classiques of La Fontaine's Fables are excessively free; the attraction of these vers mêlés lies not only in their improvised and virtuosic quality, but also, and paradoxically, in their apparently unlaboured naturalness, a quality seen also in several poets of the late 17th c.: Deshoulières, Chaulieu, La Fare.

The lyric suffered in the 18th c. from a surfeit of ossified diction, mythological allusion, and unwieldy rhetoric. Poets found it difficult to occupy the middle ground between ratiocinative gravity and social entertainment. To some (La Motte, Fontenelle) poetry seemed wilful mystification and a dangerous enthralment of judgement; Voltaire had to admit that ‘de toutes les nations polies, la nôtre est la moins poétique’, rich in poetics, poor in poetry. J.-B. Rousseau, a protégé of Boileau's, is best known for his odes, cantatas, and epigrams: his hetero-metric and hetero-stanzaic structures have a diversity of pace and metrical eventfulness which can please over larger spans. Le Franc de Pompignan's ‘Ode sur la mort de J.-B. Rousseau’ has an adroit mixture of paradox and pathos, found also in his biblical verse. The ode is equally the forte of Écouchard Lebrun. After the mid-century, the influence of English topographical and seasonal poetry was felt: Virgil and James Thomson combined to engender Saint-Lambert's Les Saisons, Roucher's Les Mois, and Delille's Les Jardins. The century's poetry culminated in the work of André Chénier: elegies, odes, epistles, idylls, scientific and philosophical poems, and the bitterly satirical Iambes.

c. Romantic Poetry. Chénier's poems were finally published in 1819, shortly after the intense, confessional Élégies et romances of Desbordes-Valmore, and a year before Romanticism's ‘official’ poetic inception with Lamartine's Méditations (‘Je suis le premier … qui ai donné à ce qu'on nommait la Muse, au lieu d'une lyre de sept cordes de convention, les fibres mêmes du cœur de l'homme …’). Very different from Lamartine's suave melancholy is Vigny's blunt and clear-headed disillusionment, his stoical idealism, expressed in poems published between 1822 and 1864 (Les Destinées). Vigny has little of the verse and ironic fantaisie associated with Musset's earlier verse, qualities which were transformed into the altogether darker hues of Les Nuits. Bestriding the century, both as figurehead and survivor of Romanticism, is Hugo, whose work explores all dimensions of the movement: the picturesque and exotic (Les Orientales), the sentimentally familial (Les Feuilles d'automne), the politically committed ( Les Châtiments), spiritual autobiography ( Les Contemplations), and cultural history ( La Légende des siècles). Throughout Hugo's work one finds moments of intense visionary encounter, involving both memory and fantasy; similar encounters are recorded in Nerval's Les Chimères, different, however, in their unaffected familiarity with myth, in their peculiarly confident hermeticism.

d. Symbolism and Parnassianism. The achievement of vision in and through language is a central concern of the Symbolist poets, whether in Baudelaire's ‘surnaturalisme’, in Rimbaud's ‘long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens’, or in Mallarmé's image of the poet as ‘une aptitude qu'a l'Univers spirituel à se voir et se développer’. These enterprises involve the suppression of the personal voice of the poet, as he yields the initiative to words or inhabits other consciousnesses (Baudelaire's ‘sainte prostitution de l'âme’, Rimbaud's ‘Je est un autre’). Alongside the visionary runs the intimate, the tracing of feelings which do not have the unambiguous, self-justifying power of Romantic feeling, but are fleeting, mixed with sensation, multiple (Verlaine, Henri de Régnier, Samain). A third current derives from the irony cultivated by Baudelaire in the figures of the dandy and the fallen angel: the poem becomes the site of psychological investigation, a probing of the layers of consciousness which exist between the poet and his self, poet and reader; the contract of complicity with the reader is broken, and meaning constantly shifts in the relationship of mutual distrust, while language flouts the poetic in the prosaic or whimsical (Verlaine, Cros, Corbière, Laforgue).

From the 1850s, and particularly Gautier's Émaux et camées, dates the other large trend of the latter half of the 19th c., Parnassianism, whose coherence is difficult to establish other than negatively. That there was a reaction against the facility and self-exposure of the Romantics, their amateurism and glorification of the poetic gift, cannot be doubted. But this response is common to Symbolism too. Gautier makes a virtue of difficulty, to the point of virtuosity, as does, in even more acrobatic vein, Banville, with his revival of fixed forms. But this aesthetic prizing of the dulce over the utile does not square with Leconte de Lisle's philosophical and positivistic historicism, with its appealing note of unappeasable yearning, nor with the domestic realism of François Coppée, nor with the melancholy moralizing of Sully Prudhomme. And Heredia's sonnet-cycle, Les Trophées, for all its epic historical scale, is full of Symbolism in its suggestive ellipses and compressions.

e. Twentieth Century. Symbolism's heritage in the 20th c. runs through the dynamic socialism of Verhaeren and the rustic Catholicism of Jammes, and culminates in Valéry's subtle enquiry into creative consciousness and a purified poetic act, an enquiry reopened much later by Deguy and the poet-mathematician Roubaud. The Catholic tradition of the early century found its most powerful expression in the ample, magisterial versets of Claudel's Cinq grandes odes and in the obsessive insistence of Péguy's verse. The all-encompassing, rhapsodic, Whitmanian strain in Claudel is to be found in other poets, in the Unanimists (Jules Romains), in globe-trotting poets such as Cendrars, Larbaud, and Saint-John Perse. Cendrars shared with Apollinaire an enthusiasm for the contemporary arts, and particularly for the aesthetic of simultaneity; the latter's Calligrammes explore the ‘idéogramme lyrique’, while Reverdy, in his turn, uses layout to project his linguistic Cubism. Reverdy's definition of the image (‘Plus les rapports de deux réalités rapprochées seront lointaines et justes, plus l'image sera forte’) lies at the heart of Surrealist poetics, itself inextricably linked with the visual arts [see Breton; éLuard; Desnos; Aragon]. On the fringes of Surrealism, Supervielle pursued his intuited presences, while Jouve fused Freud with Christianity in a prophetic mode; the voice of Christian vision is also to be heard in Jouve's disciple Pierre Emmanuel and in Patrice de La Tour du Pin.

Eluard, Aragon, Desnos, Emmanuel were poets of the Resistance, as was Char, whose later collections are suffused by an elliptical elementalism. A vein of wit in modern French poetry is represented by Prévert, Queneau, and Tardieu; these poets achieve their effects by adopting the unauthorized point of view, as indeed do the poets who adopt ‘le parti pris des choses’, Ponge and Guillevic. In many senses Ponge and Guillevic are in search of the same revelation of inalienable being as Bonnefoy; the answer of Henri Michaux to the blankness or hostility of available reality lies in the exorcizing power of language itself. Jacottet and Réda, on the other hand, aim to capture the epiphanies of past and passing sensation, the one in a poetry drastically pared down, the other in a fuller, elegiac mode. If the French language is a means of transformation and redemption for some, for others it is full of potential treacheries and misrepresentations: the founding poets of négritude, Senghor and Césaire, had to colonize French to express the universals of blackness; and, in their footsteps, a francophone poetry of alternative ethnic identities and histories has proliferated in sub-Saharan Africa, the West Indies, the countries of the Maghreb, and Quebec. [See also Anthologies; Versification.]

[Clive Scott]

Bibliography

• G. Brereton, An Introduction to the French Poets: Villon to the Present Day (rev. edn., 1973)
• S. Brindeau, La Poésie contemporaine de langue française depuis 1945 (1973)
• R. Sabatier, Histoire de la poésie française, 9 vols. (1975-88)
• K. Aspley and P. France (eds.), Poetry in France (1992)

A poem expressing the subjective feelings and personal emotions of the poet. Such poetry is melodic, since it was originally accompanied by a lyre in recitals. Most Western poetry in the twentieth century may be classified as lyrical. Examples of lyric poetry include A. E. Housman's elegy "To an Athlete Dying Young," the odes of Pindar and Horace, Thomas Gray and William Collins, the sonnets of Sir Thomas Wyatt and Sir Philip Sidney, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Rainer Maria Rilke, and a host of other forms in the poetry of William Blake and Christina Rossetti, among many others.

The examples and perspective in this article may not represent a worldwide view of the subject. Please improve this article and discuss the issue on the talk page.

Henry Oliver Walker, Lyric Poetry (1896). Library of Congress Thomas Jefferson Building, Washington, D.C.

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Lyric poetry is usually a short or a long poem with rhyming that expresses personal feelings. It need not be (but can be) set to music.^[1] Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, merely mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and other forms of mimesis. The modern concept of a lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient definition was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek culture presupposed live performance accompanied by a stringed instrument.

Contents 1 Forms 2 Meters 3 History of lyric poetry 3.1 The Classical period 3.2 Middle Ages 3.3 16th Century 3.4 17th Century 3.5 18th Century 3.6 19th Century 3.7 20th Century 4 References

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. Other forms of the lyric include ballades,^[2] villanelles,^[2] minnesang, pastourelle, canzone, and stev.

Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition, alliteration, and chiasmus for many of its effects. Ancient Greek and Roman lyric poetry was composed in strophes. Pindar's epinician odes, where strophe and antistrophe are followed by an epode, represent an expansion of the same basic principle. The Greeks distinguished, however, between lyric monody (e.g. Sappho, Anacreon) and choral lyric (e.g. Pindar, Bacchylides). In all such poetry the fundamental formal feature is the repetition of a metrical pattern larger than a verse or distich. In some cases (although not in antiquity), form and theme are wed in the conception of a genre, as in the medieval alva or aubade, a dawn song in which lovers must part after a night of love, often with the watchman's refrain telling them it is time to go. A common feature of some lyric forms is the refrain of one or more verses that end each strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with variation. In the medieval Galician-Portuguese cantigas de amigo, thought to reflect an old oral tradition, 90% of the texts have a refrain.

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.
• 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.
• Spondaic - two syllables, with two successive long or stressed syllables.

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

Alcaeus of Mytilene and Sappho, Attic red-figure kalathos, ca. 470 BC, Staatliche Antikensammlungen (Inv. 2416)

For the ancient Greeks, lyric poetry had a precise technical meaning: verse that was accompanied by a lyre or other stringed instrument (e.g. the barbiton). The lyric 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.^[3] 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).^[4] Among the major extant Roman poets of the classical period, only Catullus (nos. 11, 17, 30, 34, 51, 61) and Horace (four books of Odes) wrote lyric poetry, which however was no longer meant to be sung, but 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 ("newer poets"), who spurned epic poetry, following the lead of Callimachus, and instead composed brief highly polished poems in various thematic and metrical genres. The Roman love elegy of Tibullus, Propertius and Ovid (Amores, Heroides), with its focus on the poetic "I" and the expression of personal 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.^[5]

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 that 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 a poem which has been written so that it could be set to music -- whether or not it is. A poem's particular structure, function or theme is not specified by the term.^[6] 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.^[7] 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".^[8] Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères, Minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition.^[9] There is also a large body of medieval Galician-Portuguese lyric.^[10]

Gamle-stev have been around, at least since the end of the 1200s. Some of these were translated to Swedish, at the request of queen Eufemia, around year 1300 (The so-called "Eufemia-viser"). 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 made much use of in his Vita Nova. 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 ("Song Book"). Laura is in many ways both the culmination of medieval courtly love poetry and the beginning of Renaissance love lyric.

16th Century

Thomas Campion wrote lute songs. Sir Philip Sidney, Edmund Spenser and William Shakespeare helped popularize the sonnet. The Naga-Uta is a lyric poem ,popular in this era ,in alternating five and seven lines and ending with an extra seven-syllable line.(see also the earlier choka version)

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. Although better known for his epic Lusiadas, Luís de Camões is also considered the greatest Portuguese lyric poet of the period.

17th Century

Lyric is the dominant poetic idiom in seventeenth century English poetry from John Donne to Andrew Marvell.^[11] The poems of this period are short, rarely tell a story and are intense in expression.^[11] 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. Matsuo Bashō is a Japanese lyric poet.

18th Century

In the eighteenth century lyric poetry declined in England and France. The atmosphere of the English coffee-house or French salon, where literature was discussed, was not congenial to lyric poetry.^[12] 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.

19th Century

Portrait of William Wordsworth, 1842, by Benjamin Haydon

In Europe the lyric emerges as the principal poetic form of the nineteenth century, and comes to be seen as synonymous with poetry itself.^[13] Romantic lyric poetry consists of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; feelings are extreme, but personal.^[14]

The traditional form of the sonnet is revived in Britain, with William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet.^[13] Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Later in the century the Victorian lyric is more linguistically self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic lyric.^[15] 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.^[16] 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.^[17]

The nineteenth century in France sees a confident recovery of the lyric voice after its relative demise in the eighteenth century.^[18] The lyric becomes the dominant mode in French poetry of this period.^[19] Charles Baudelaire is, for Walter Benjamin, the last European example of lyric poetry "successful on a mass scale."^[20]

The eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries constitute the period of the rise of Russian lyric poetry, exemplified by Aleksandr Pushkin.^[21] The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems.^[22] 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.

20th Century

See 20th century lyric poetry

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,^[23] 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.^[24]

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 nineteenth century, feeling that it relied too heavily on melodious language, rather than complexity of thought.^[25] After the second world war 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.^[26] 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.^[27]

References

Wikisource has the text of the 1911 Encyclopædia Britannica article Lyrical poetry.

1. ^ Tom McArthur (ed), The Oxford Companion to the English Language, Oxford University Press, 1992, p632.
2. ^ ^{a b} Northrop Frye, The Eternal Act of Creation: Essays, 1979-90, Indiana University Press, 1993, p133. ISBN 0253325161
3. ^ Cecil Maurice Bowra, Greek Lyric Poetry: From Alcman to Simonides, Oxford University Press, 1961, p3.
4. ^ James W. Halporn, Thomas G. Rosenmeyer, Martin Ostwald, The Meters of Greek and Latin Poetry, Hackett Publishing, 1994, p16. ISBN 0872202437
5. ^ Peter Bing and Rip Cohen, Games of Venus: An Anthology of Greek and Roman Erotic Verse from Sappho to Ovid, New York and London, Routledge, 1991.
6. ^ Mary Lewis Shaw, The Cambridge Introduction to French Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp39-40. ISBN 0521004853
7. ^ Sarah Kay, Terence Cave, Malcolm Bowie, A Short History of French Literature, Oxford University Press, 2006, pp15-16. ISBN 0198159315
8. ^ Sidney M. Johnson, Marion Elizabeth Gibbs, Medieval German Literature: A Companion, Routledge, 2000, p224. ISBN 0415928966
9. ^ Sidney M. Johnson, Marion Elizabeth Gibbs, Medieval German Literature: A Companion, Routledge, 2000, p225. ISBN 0415928966
10. ^ Giuseppe Tavani, Trovadores e Jograis: Introdução à poesia medieval galego-portuguesa. Lisbon: Caminho, 2002.
11. ^ ^{a b} Thomas N. Corns, The Cambridge Companion to English Poetry, Donne to Marvell, Cambridge University Press, 1993, pxi. ISBN 0521423090
12. ^ Sir Albert Wilson in J. O. Lindsay, The New Cambridge Modern History, Cambridge University Press, 1957, p73. ISBN 0521045452
13. ^ ^{a b} Christopher John Murray, Encyclopedia of the Romantic Era, 1760-1850, Taylor & Francis, 2004, p700. ISBN 1579584225
14. ^ Stephen Bygrave, Romantic Writings, Routledge, 1996, pix. ISBN 041513577X
15. ^ E. Warwick Slinn in Joseph Bristow, The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, Cambridge University Press, p56. ISBN 0521646804
16. ^ Eda Sagarra and Peter Skrine, A Companion to German Literature: From 1500 to the Present, Blackwell Publishing, 1997, p149. ISBN 0631215956
17. ^ György Lukács, German Realists in the Nineteenth Century, MIT Press, 1993, p56. ISBN 0262621436
18. ^ Christopher Prendergast, Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Reading, Cambridge University Press, 1990. p3. ISBN 0521347742
19. ^ Christopher Prendergast, Nineteenth-Century French Poetry: Introductions to Close Reading, Cambridge University Press, 1990. p15. ISBN 0521347742
20. ^ Quoted in Max Pensky, Melancholy Dialectics: Walter Benjamin and the Play of Mourning, University of Massachusetts Press, 1993, p155. ISBN 1558492968
21. ^ Roman Jakobson, Selected Writings, Walter de Gruyter, 1981, p282 . ISBN 9027976864
22. ^ William L. Richardson and Jesse M. Owen, Literature of the World: An Introductory Study, Kessinger Publishing, 2005, p348. ISBN 1417994339
23. ^ Christopher John MacGowan, Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Blackwell Publishing, 2004, p9.ISBN 0631220259
24. ^ Robert Fitzroy Foster, W.B. Yeats: A Life, Oxford University Press, p496. ISBN 0192880853
25. ^ Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p49. ISBN 0521891493
26. ^ Stephen Fredman, A Concise Companion To Twentieth-century American Poetry, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p63. ISBN 1405120029
27. ^ Christopher Beach, The Cambridge Introduction to Twentieth-Century American Poetry, Cambridge University Press, 2003, p155. ISBN 0521891493

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