LYRIC
Defenition
of Lyric
The
lyric is more a poetic manner than a form, it is more variable and less subject
to strick convention than narrative poetry.[1]
Poetry is an imaginative awareness
of experience expressed through meaning, sound and rytmic language choices so
as to evoke an emotional response.[2]
Lyric poetry is typically
characterized by brevity, melody and emotional intensity.
Lyric is expressing the writer's
personal feelings and thoughts, of or relating to such poetry, a short poem of
songlike quality. Lyric Haves many kinds, such as :
1. Lyric
Music
2. Lyric
Poetry
3. Lyric
Sonnet
4. Lyric
Ballad
Lyric poetry is a genre of poetry
that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient world, lyric
poems were those which were sung to the lyre. Lyric poems do not have to
rhyme, and today do not need to be set to music or a beat. Aristotle, in Poetics 1447a, mentions lyric poetry (kitharistike
played to the cithara, a type
of lyre) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing, painting and
other forms of mimesis. The
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.[3]
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, villanelles, odes,
pastourelle and canzone.
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.[4]
Meter of Lyric Poetry
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.[4]
- Pyrrhic - Two unstressed syllables
- 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.
History of Lyric Poetry
The Classical period
Greece
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 barbitos). 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.[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).
Rome
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.
China
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: 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
German writers Friedrich Schlegel, Joseph von Hammer-Purgstall and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who called
Hafiz his "twin".
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. 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 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".[11]
Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères,
Minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition. There is also a large body
of medieval Galician-Portuguese 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 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 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 ("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 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 17th 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. 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 18th 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. 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 HaydonIn
Europe the lyric emerges as the principal poetic form of the 19th century, and
comes to be seen as synonymous with poetry itself.[16]
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.[16]
Other important Romantic lyric writers of the period include Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats,
Percy Bysshe Shelley and George Gordon, Lord Byron. Later in the
century the Victorian lyric is more linguistically
self-conscious and defensive than the Romantic lyric.[18]
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.[19]
According to Georg Lukács, 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 19th century in
France sees a confident recovery of the lyric voice after its relative demise
in the 18th century.[21]
The lyric becomes the dominant mode in French poetry of this period.[22]
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.[24]
The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement
and their chief poet, Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many
lyric poems.[25]
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
In the early years of the 20th century rhymed lyric poetry,
usually expressing the feelings of the poet, was the dominant poetic form in
America,[26]
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.[27]
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.[28]
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.[29]
Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex and domestic life constituted the
new mainstream of American poetry in the late 20th century, influenced by the confessional poets of the 1950s and 60s, such
as Sylvia Plath
and Anne Sexton.[5]
Example of Lyric
“Italian Sonnet”
“Turn back the heart you've turned away
Give back your kissing breath
Leave not my love as you have left
The broken hearts of yesterday
But wait, be still, don't lose this way
Affection now, for what you guess
May be something more, could be less
Accept my love, live for today.”
“Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed,
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature's changing course untrimmed.”
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