Lyric - Literary Terms
Lyric - Literary Terms
Lyric is a type of poetry marked by emotion, melody, imagination, and a unified effect.
Originally, lyric poetry was sung to the accompaniment of a lyre. Today, the term encompasses poetry in which the poet expresses personal thoughts and feelings, as opposed to epic or dramatic poetry, which describes external circumstances and events. The lyric is a broad type, and subsumes a good variety of types of poetry like the ode, elegy, ballad and sonnet. A strict definition of lyric is not possible. However, its distinguishing characteristics are emotion, subjectivity, melodiousness, imagination, description, and meditation.
In English literature the history of the lyric goes back to the earliest epic, Beowulf, which contains passages with lyric qualities. The Anglo-Saxon poem, Deor's Lament is essentially lyric in purpose. Before 1400, Chaucer had written a number of lyrics, many modelled on French forms.
In Elizabethan England, the lyric was further developed by Johnson, Herrick Sidney, Spenser, and Shakespeare. The great Romantic poets, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats.and the major Victorian poets extensively used the lyric form. The lyric continues to be a widely used form of poetic expression.
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