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. Among the lyric poets of ancient Greece were 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 stand out. The greatest French lyric poet after the troubadours was the 15th-century poet François Villon; 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 the term lyric was applied also to verse that was not sung. The sung lyric, including the madrigal, may be found in poetry of the Elizabethan era—for example, the work of Thomas Campion and John Dowland—as well as in the songs in Shakespeare's plays. 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. Among the great sonneteers of England were Sir Thomas Wyatt, Samuel Daniel, Michael Drayton, Shakespeare, and John Donne; lyrics in other forms were contributed by John Skelton, Edmund Spenser, 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 were 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 poets of the Romantic period all wrote in the lyric mode; William Blake's Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience, William Wordsworth's sonnets, John Keats's odes, and Percy Bysshe Shelley's elegy on the death of Keats are exceptional examples.

Later in the 19th century, both Robert Browning and Alfred, Lord Tennyson, produced a variety of lyrical poems, and Gerard Manley Hopkins wrote sonnets with innovative rhythms. Among the chief French lyric poets of this period were Charles Baudelaire, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud, and Stéphane Mallarmé. In the United States Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson were the outstanding lyricists.

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; Italian poet Giacomo Leopardi; playwright and poet Federico García Lorca of Spain; the Mexican poet Octavio Paz; and the Alexandrian-born Greek poet Constantine Cavafy.