Lyric Poetry
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Lyric poetry
Derived from the Greek adjective o (‘for the lyre’), was the name given in ancient Greece to verses sung to a lyre, whether as a solo performance ( Sappho ) or by a choir ( Pindar ). The Greek lyrists were then imitated in Latin at an artistic level by Catullus and Horace , but what appears to have been more important for the development of the genre was the tradition of popular song which existed both in Rome and among the German tribes. This continued to flourish in spite of the Church's disapproval and produced in all the medieval literatures of western Europe a lyric harvest that ranged from hymns to bawdy drinking songs and drew its authors from every social category. In England lyric poems flourished in the Middle English period (in such manuscript collections as the Harley Lyrics ), and in the 16th-cent. heyday of humanism this already quite sophisticated lyric tradition was enriched by the direct imitation of ancient models and reached perfection in the songbooks and plays of the Elizabethan age. During the next 200 years the link between poetry and music was gradually broken, and the term ‘lyric’ came to be applied to short poems expressive of a poet's thoughts or feelings, and which could not be classed under another heading. The convention that a poem communicates its author's feelings to a reader reached the high point of its popularity in the Romantic period, but soon after Baudelaire introduced the modern form of lyric poetry in which the poet seems to struggle to express for his own satisfaction psychic experiences whose nature he at times only half understands: the lyric of Mallarmé , Rilke , Yeats , and T. S. Eliot .
"lyric, lyric poetry" The Oxford Companion to English Literature. Ed. Margaret Drabble. Oxford University Press, 2000. Oxford Reference Online. Oxford University Press. Temple University. 30 January 2007 <http://www.oxfordreference.com/views/ENTRY.html?subview=Main&entry=t113.e4695>
Here is an example of lyric poetry:
1 By strange effects "of Study's vauntive ken" [Footnote a: 1Kb]
2 One William Preston did espy
3 An untrod path of Poesy.
4 What then?
5 He got on Pegasus, and mounted soon
6 "Up to the pleni-lunar Hand o' the Moon,"
7 To meet with Madness:---she
8 Peopled his verse with dire Variety:
9 Dæmons, Harpies, Ghosts by myriads,
10 All and some,
11 See they come,
12 With Tritons, Screech-owls, Wolves and Nereids,
13 Leaving their "fretted Vaults of sculptur'd Foam."---
14 Now, wherefore dost thou call?
15 Go, says he, go, tell Mason how I show'd
16 Another way to make an Ode
17 That's all
Huddesford, George, 1749-1809: ODE FOR WILLIAM PRESTON,
Author of an irregular Ode to the Moon, added to an Essay upon Lyric Poetry, and inserted in the 1st Volume of Philosophical Transactions, Dublin, 1787. [from The Wiccamical Chaplet (1804)]
--Katenitz 17:20, 30 January 2007 (EST)
