Antiquity and
Sappho depicted on an
Attic red-figure
calathus BC
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. 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 in
odes 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 surviving
Roman poets of the classical period, only
Catullus (
11,
17,
30,
34,
51,
61) and
Horace (
Odes) wrote lyric poetry, which was 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.
China 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
Wei and
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.
Medieval verse 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 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". 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. 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. 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". Initially imitating the lyrics of the French troubadours and trouvères,
minnesang soon established a distinctive tradition.
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.
16th century 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, a group 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
ode. 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,
Francisco de Medrano 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 Lyrical poetry was the dominant form of 17th century English poetry from
John Donne to
Andrew Marvell. The poems of this period were short. Rarely narrative, they tended towards intense expression. 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".
19th century 's 1842 portrait of
William Wordsworth. In Europe, the lyric emerged as the principal poetic form of the 19th century and came to be seen as synonymous with poetry.
Romantic lyric poetry consisted of first-person accounts of the thoughts and feelings of a specific moment; the feelings were extreme but personal. The traditional
sonnet was revived in Britain, with
William Wordsworth writing more sonnets than any other British poet. Such 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. 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
Brentano's
Des Knaben Wunderhorn. France also saw a revival of the lyric voice during the 19th century. The lyric became the dominant mode of French poetry during this period. In
Russia,
Aleksandr Pushkin exemplified a rise of lyric poetry during the 18th and early 19th centuries. The Swedish "Phosphorists" were influenced by the Romantic movement and their chief poet
Per Daniel Amadeus Atterbom produced many lyric poems. 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. Catalan lyric poets include
Jacint Verdaguer, and
Miquel Costa i Llobera. Japanese lyric poets include
Taneda Santoka,
Masaoka Shiki, and
Ishikawa Takuboku.
20th century 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, Europe, and the
British colonies. The English
Georgian poets and their contemporaries 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. 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. 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. Lyric poetry dealing with relationships, sex, and domestic life constituted the new mainstream of American poetry in the middle of the 20th century, following such movements as the
confessional poets of the 1950s and 1960s, who included
Sylvia Plath and
Anne Sexton. the
Black Mountain movement with
Robert Creeley, Organic Verse represented by
Denise Levertov, Projective verse or "open field" composition as represented by
Charles Olson, and also
Language Poetry which aimed for extreme minimalism along with numerous other experimental verse movements throughout the remainder of the 20th century, up into today where these questions of what constitutes poetry, lyrical or otherwise, are still being discussed but now in the context of hypertext and multimedia as it is used via the Internet. ==References==