Lyric

I

Introduction

Lyric, short poem that conveys intense feeling or profound thought. In ancient Greece, lyrics were sung or recited to the accompaniment of the lyre. Elegies and odes were popular forms of the lyric in classical times. The lyric poets of ancient Greece included Sappho, Alcaeus, and Pindar; the major Roman lyric poets included Horace, Ovid, and Catullus. Lyrical poetry was also written in ancient India and China; and the Japanese verse called haiku is a lyric.

II

Forms

The troubadours and trouvères of medieval France developed lyric forms such as the canzone and rondeau for singing. In Germany the earliest lyricists were the minnesingers. Although most medieval lyrics were written anonymously, two names are notable. The 15th-century poet François Villon was the greatest French lyric poet after the troubadours; the earliest English lyrics were by the 14th-century master Geoffrey Chaucer. Ballads, often classed as narrative poems, are considered lyrics by some scholars because they are sung.

By the beginning of the Renaissance (14th century to 17th century) the term lyric also was applied to verse that was not sung. The sung lyric, including the madrigal, may be found in poetry of the Elizabethan era (16th century)—for example, in the work of the English musicians Thomas Campion and John Dowland—as well as in the songs in the plays of the English writer William Shakespeare. Italian poets such as Petrarch developed the sonnet, a lyric form that became popular for the treatment of both secular and religious themes in late Renaissance and early 17th-century Europe. Notable sonnet writers of the time in France included Pierre de Ronsard and Joachim du Bellay. The great sonneteers of England included Sir Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Shakespeare, Sir Philip Sidney, and John Donne; lyrics in other forms were contributed by John Skelton, Ben Jonson, and Robert Herrick. The shorter poems of John Milton and the odes of John Dryden were important additions to the lyric mode in the 17th century.

III

18th- and 19th-Century Lyric Poetry

The most important German lyric poets of the 18th and early 19th centuries included Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich von Schiller, and Heinrich Heine. In the mid-18th century in England Thomas Gray and William Collins wrote important odes and elegies; at the end of the century the Scottish poet Robert Burns wrote lyrics in his native dialect. English lyric poetry flourished in the romantic period (18th century and 19th century). Songs of Innocence (1789) and Songs of Experience (1794) by William Blake, Lyrical Ballads (1798) by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and numerous short poems by John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Lord Byron include outstanding lyrics.

---

---

Later in the 19th century Alfred, Lord Tennyson and A. E. Housman produced a variety of lyrical poems. During the same period Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote sonnets with innovative rhythms, and Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning also wrote fine sonnets. In 1859Edward FitzGerald produced a famous volume of translations from the Persian collection of verse Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (12th century). The chief French lyric poets of this period included Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In the United States the outstanding lyricists included Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Giacomo Leopardi was the leading Italian lyricist of the time.

IV

The Modern Lyric

The lyric mode is still almost universally popular in modern times. Notable lyrics have been written by the Americans Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and E. E. Cummings; the Irish poet and playwright William Butler Yeats; W. H. Auden and Stephen Spender of England; the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas; German poets Stefan George and Rainer Maria Rilke, and Austrian poet Hugo von Hofmannsthal; Paul Valéry and Guillaume Apollinaire of France; playwright and poet Federico García Lorca of Spain; the Mexican poet Octavio Paz; and the Alexandrian-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.

	More from Encarta
	•  Presidential Myths Quiz •  Coffee break: Recharge your brain