Lyric Poetry

1
Lyric Poetry

• The Cultural Life of a Concept

2
Historical Definitions

• Thought of as a song
• Opposed to narrative and dramatic forms of poetry
• An objective genre, not dependent on
• Attitude
• Theme
• Rhetoric

3
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.

4
Edgar Allen Poe

• The lyric must be brief
• Philosophy of Composition

5
William Wordsworth

• The spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.

6
Hegel

• An intensely subjective and personal expression.

7
John Stuart Mill

• The utterance that is overheard.
• 'Lyric poetry' is 'more eminently and
  peculiarly poetry than any other.' (1833
  discussion of Wordsworth)

8
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
  poemsunless accompanied by rapidity of movement,
  brevity, and the colouring of human passionhave
  been excluded.
• Preface to The Golden Treasury (1861)

9
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)

10
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

11
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)

12
Herbert Read

• "clarity, succinctness, simplicity
• Nature of Metaphysical Poetry (1938)

13
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.

14
Helen Vendler

• A lyrics function is to give aesthetically
  convincing representations of feelings felt and
  thoughts thought.
• The Art of Shakespeares Sonnets, 1997

15
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 lyrics 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

16
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

17
Lyric Poem

• short
• personal expression of an I
• usually ruminative and retrospective,
• minimally narrative
• sudden, epiphanic moment of realization at the
  end

18
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.

19
The Road Not Taken

• TWO 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

20
Digging

• Between my finger and my thumb
• The squat pen rests snug as a gun.
• Under my window, a clean rasping sound
• When the spade sinks into gravelly ground
• My father, digging. I look down
• Till his straining rump among the flowerbeds
• Bends low, comes up twenty years away
• Stooping in rhythm through potato drills
• Where he was digging.
• The coarse boot nestled on the lug, the shaft
• Against the inside knee was levered firmly.
• He rooted out tall tops, buried the bright edge
  deep
• To scatter new potatoes that we picked,
• Loving their cool hardness in our hands.
• By God, the old man could handled a spade.

• My grandfather cut more turf in a day
• Than any other man on Toners 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 Ive no spade to follow men like them.
• Between my finger and my thumb
• The squat pen rests.
• Ill dig with it.
• Seamus Heaney, 1966