Lyric poetry is a personal and emotional style that can take many forms and is defined by tone. It is often associated with musical qualities and celebrates human relationships. Its origins can be traced back to ancient Greece and have since spread to other cultures. Today, the lyrical word is often associated with music, but the careful analysis of its hidden meanings remains the same.
Lyric poetry is a deeply felt and personal poetic style, romantic in subject matter and highly emotional in delivery. This type of poem cannot be defined strictly in terms of a formal structure such as a sonnet, villanelle or sestet, but rather in terms of tone. Some formally constructed poems, however, also fall under the category of lyric poetry. Most experts agree that musical qualities are a distinguishing feature and point to the name “lyric” in relation to the ancient Greek stringed musical instrument, a lyre.
Capable of taking a wide range of forms, lyric poetry takes its definition from the combination of subject and treatment of that subject by the poet’s choice of language, perspective, and poetic voice. Odes, or poems of praise, often have a lyrical component, as do some sonnets and ballads. As with the ancient Greeks, modern lyric poets continue to celebrate human relationships through the depiction of emotion and action on a personal stage rather than through the sweeping grandeur of epic events or chronologically long narratives.
Ancient Greek lyric poems as described by Aristotle in his Poetics, the first known work of literary criticism, were at that time performed exclusively to the accompaniment of musical instruments and sung with meter precision. The Romans inherited the form but erased its musical accompaniment and flattened sung phrases into spoken ones. Modern definitions of lyric poetry have since abandoned metrical requirements and the ancient Greek expectation that it be performed together with a stringed instrument, although its musical birthright remains in repeated lines or the presence of a refrain.
Since the Renaissance, a fascination with personal experience and with individual, sincere emotions about these experiences had developed deep roots within culture at all levels. Court intrigue and peasant love are applauded in the lyric poetry of that period. These poets often spoke in the first person, offering a narrator with experiences familiar to the poem’s audience or reflecting the poet’s personal experiences.
When viewed in terms of subject matter rather than historical influences, lyric poetry is not limited to the Western world. As Europe struggled through the Middle Ages, Persia popularized the tenderness of the ghazal. Ghazals are rhymed couplets that include a refrain. In China, the shackles of the highly restrictive structural requirements of the four-character poetic lines of classical poetry were released by a new type of poetry that allowed for both shorter and longer lines, leading to the creation of poems whose forms were responses to personal topic.
The lyric in poetry has become so popular in recent centuries that it has come full circle. Today, most young people hear the lyrical word not as a poetic style but as the words of a piece of music. Their ancestors no doubt listened to a lyric poem performed on a stage or in a café and subtly debated its meaning, while today’s celebrants of the lyric poem bring the same careful analysis of the hidden meanings in the words of a song.
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