Lyric PoetryThe Cultural Life of a Concept

Historical Definitions

• Thought of as a song

• Opposed to narrative and dramatic forms of poetry

• An objective genre, not dependent on– Attitude– Theme– Rhetoric

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

A lyric must “be one, the parts of which mutually support and explain each other, all in their proportion harmonizing with, and supporting the purpose and known influence of metrical arrangement.”

Edgar Allen Poe

The lyric must be brief

—Philosophy of Composition

William Wordsworth

“The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.”

Hegel

“An intensely subjective and personal expression.”

John Stuart Mill

“The utterance that is overheard.”

'Lyric poetry' is 'more eminently and peculiarly poetry than any other.' (1833 discussion of Wordsworth)

Frances Turner Palgrave

“Lyrical has been here held essentially to imply that each Poem shall turn on some single thought, feeling, or situation. In accordance with this, narrative, descriptive, and didactic poems—unless accompanied by rapidity of movement, brevity, and the colouring of human passion—have been excluded.”

—Preface to The Golden Treasury (1861)

John Drinkwater

“The characteristic of the lyric is that it is the product of the pure poetic energy unassociated with other energies, and that lyric and poetry are synonymous terms.”

—The Lyric (1920)

Eunice Tietjens

"The lyric deals first of all with the heart, and the other forms of poetry, to a greater or less degree, with the mind. And fashions in thought change with unchanging rapidity. But the heart does not change. . . . The first essential of a lyric is therefore that it shall deal with a fundamental, a universal emotion of the human heart. The lyrist must be able to see through the swathings of thought the eternal core of emotion.”

—1923

J.C. Squire

"Contemporary poetry, the best of it, is lyrical. That is to say, it deals very little with ideas. . . . It is with simple matters that most good modern English verse is concerned; and a simple lyric may outlive many ambitious monuments.”

—Poets of Our Time (1932)

Herbert Read

"clarity, succinctness, simplicity”

—Nature of Metaphysical Poetry (1938)

M.H. Abrams

“Any fairly short poem consisting of the utterance by a single speaker, who expresses a state of mind or a process of perception, thought, and feeling. Many lyric speakers are represented as musing in solitude.”

Helen Vendler

A lyric’s function is to give “aesthetically convincing representations of feelings felt and thoughts thought.”

—The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, 1997

Sharon Cameron

“Unlike the drama, whose province is conflict, and unlike the novel or narrative, which connects isolated moments of time to create a story multiply peopled and framed by a social context, the lyric voice speaks out of a single moment in time.”“The heart of the lyric’s sense of time might be specified, at least preliminarily, by its propensity to interiorize as ambiguity or outright contradiction those conflicts that other mimetic forms conspicuously exteriorize and then allocate to discrete characters who enact them in the manifest pull of opposite points of view.”

—Lyric Time, 1979

George T. Wright“In their ‘pure’ forms the lyric presents one speaker, the drama more than one. We call lyrical, therefore, those dramas in which one character (with his point of view) so predominates that his confrontations of other characters seem falsified: the meetings with other personae are merely opportunities for their spiritual domination by the hero.“Similarly, the lyric is or becomes dramatic when it presents not a single point of view but a struggle between conflicting points of view. The deliberate placing of a distance between the poet and his lyric persona effectively dramatizes the substance of the poem.”

—“The Faces of the Poet”

Lyric Poem

short personal expression of an “I” usually ruminative and retrospective, minimally narrativesudden, epiphanic moment of

realization at the end

Hugh Holman, “Closure”

“The principle that structured things do not just stop, they come to an end with a sense of conclusion, completeness, wholeness, integrity, finality, and termination.”

The Road Not TakenTWO roads diverged in a yellow

wood,

And sorry I could not travel both

And be one traveler, long I stood

And looked down one as far as I could

To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,

And having perhaps the better claim,

Because it was grassy and wanted wear;

Though as for that the passing there

Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay

In leaves no step had trodden black.

Oh, I kept the first for another day!

Yet knowing how way leads on to way,

I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh

Somewhere ages and ages hence:

Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—

I took the one less traveled by,

And that has made all the difference.

—Robert Frost, 1916

DiggingBetween my finger and my thumbThe squat pen rests; snug as a gun.

Under my window, a clean rasping soundWhen the spade sinks into gravelly ground:My father, digging. I look down

Till his straining rump among the flowerbedsBends low, comes up twenty years awayStooping in rhythm through potato drillsWhere he was digging.

The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaftAgainst the inside knee was levered firmly.He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge

deepTo scatter new potatoes that we picked,Loving their cool hardness in our hands.

By God, the old man could handled a spade.Just like his old man.

My grandfather cut more turf in a day

Than any other man on Toner’s bog.

Once I carried him milk in a bottle

Corked sloppily with paper. He straightened up

To drink it, then fell to right away

Nicking and slicing neatly, heaving sods

Over his shoulder, going down and down

For the good turf. Digging.

The cold smell of potato mould, the squelch and slap

Of soggy peat, the curt cuts of an edge

Through living roots awaken in my head.

But I’ve no spade to follow men like them.

Between my finger and my thumb

The squat pen rests.

I’ll dig with it.

—Seamus Heaney, 1966