From "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics"
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LYRIC From "The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics" Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press (Gr. lyra, "lyre"). In Western poetics, almost all poetry is now characterized as iyric, but this has not always been the case. Over the last three centuries, lyric has shifted its meaning from adjective to noun, from a quality in poetry to a category that can seem to include nearly all verse. The ancient, med., and early mod. verse we now think of as lyric was made up of a variety of songs or short *occasional poems. Since the 18th c., brevity, subjectivity, passion, and sensuality have been the qualities associated with poems called iyric; thus, in modernity, the term is used for a kind of poetry that expresses personal feeling (G.W.F. Hegel) in a concentrated and harmoniously arranged form (E. A. Poe, S. T. Coleridge) and that is indirectly addressed to the private reader (William Wordsworth, John Stuart Mill). A mod. invention, this idea of lyric has profoundly influenced how we understand the hist. of all poetic genres. In the early romantic period, lit. began to be divided into three large categories, culminating in J. W. Goethe's idea of the three "natural forms of poetry": lyric, epic, and drama. The categories were then cast as ancient distinctions, but, in fact, iyric was a third term added to literary description by 18th- and 19th-c. lit. crit. (Genette). This is not to say that there were no ancient or med. or early mod. or 17th- or 18th-c. lyric poems, but that these poems were not understood as iyric in our current sense of the term. Fowler puts the situation most succinctly when he warns that lyric in literary theory from Cicero through John Dryden is "not to be confused with the modern term." A persistent confusion—among verse genres, between historical genres and natural "forms," between adjective and noun, between cognitive and affective registers, between grammar and rhet., between privacy and publicity, and among various ideas about poetry—may be the best way to define our current sense of the lyric. It is a confusion that has proven enormously generative for both poets and critics. The etymology of lyric is derived from the Gr. musical instrument used to accompany the songs of poets. In the Alexandrian period, when the texts taken from Gr. songs were collected in the library, the poems once sung in performance were grouped together and called lyrics (Most). Thus, lyric was from its inception a term used to describe a music that could no longer be heard, an idea of poetry characterized by a lost collective experience. Most of the ancient poets we refer to as the earliest lyric poets (such as Sappho, Alcaeus, Anacreon, and Pindar) would not have understood this description. Plato and Aristotle did not use the term lyrikos in the Republic and the Poetics; before lyrikos began to be used as a term for songs once sung to the lyre, the key terms were melos (song) and melikos (songlike or melodic; see MELIC POETRY). Johnson (1982) has argued that "one thing about the nature of poetry that moderns have steadily recognized and that ancients could not recognize is the significance, the importance, of the inner stories that personal lyric imitates." If we think of the personal lyric not as a mod. invention but rather as a kind of poetry that modernity has come to recognize even retrospectively, then the absence of terms and concepts to describe ancient lyrics did not mean that ancient lyrics did not exist; on the other hand, there is abundant evidence to suggest that the reason for the absence of lyric as an important category in ancient poetics is that our notion of subjectivity, emotion, and compression in poetry—in sum, the personal lyric—did not match ideas about poetry (or persons) in antiquity. In early Lat. verse, the performance context that characterized the Gr. sense of iyrikos was replaced by "the generic fluidity and self-consciousness characteristic of Roman literature" (Lowrie). Catullus experimented with various meters to "suggest epigram or incipient elegy rather than lyric proper" and brought sapphics into Lat. in his trans. of Sappho's fragment 31, but it is Horace who claimed to have brought sapphics and alcaics to Lat. lit. in his own poetry (Lowrie). Both Catullus and Horace understood themselves to be writing poems that referred to Gr. poems once described as lyrikos, but the odes and hymns and epigrams they wrote belong to genres specific to ancient Rome and often to genres they created themselves. To describe all these genres as lyric is to gloss over the dependence of Lat. verse on an enormous range of meters (iambic, ionic, aeolic, glyconic, elegiac distich, hendecasyllable, iambo-dactylic, dactylic hexameters, scazons) that would not have been grouped under a single category, even if Horace esp. understood his work in various meters as faithful to the lost ideal of songs once sung to the lyre by Sappho and Alcaeus. Thus, while it is common for mod. discussions of lyric to include Sappho and Horace among early Western lyric poets, Sappho's performance to the lyre was not referred to as lyric in her own time, and when Horace referred to himself in his first ode as aspiring to join the lyrici vates by invoking those performances several centuries later, he did so in poems that may now seem to us brief, personal, and expressive (and so congruent with our mod. definition of lyric) but were understood in the 1st c. BCE not as lyrics but as odes. Indeed, before the early mod. period, one often finds that lyric is a rather abstract term for the miscellaneous and historically specific genres that now seem to us lyrical in retrospect. Sometimes the lyric proper is thought to have arrived in troubadour verse, but the elaborate med. distinctions among the many genres of such verse (e.g., *chanson, tenso, descort, partimen, alba, pastourelle, dansa, sirventes, cobla) are lost when we describe troubadour poems as consistently or essentially lyric (Paden). Even when medievalists such as Zumthor apply the term lyric retrospectively to "a mode of expression entirely and exclusively referring to an I, which, although frequently no more than a grammatical cipher, nonetheless fixes the plane and modalities of discourse to the exclusion of any narrative element," they use the mod. sense of lyric as poetry that is nonnarrative and personally expressive in order to characterize a variety of med. verse practices. The problem of when to date our mod. sense of the lyric extends into the early mod. period. As Greene (1999) has written, "[A]t the beginning of the early mod. period, one finds an incommensurability between what is then labeled as lyric and what we now call by that name: the technical term as received from classical Greek and the ill-defined corpus of brief, subjective writing in verse are approaching one another, but are not yet fully joined." Through the end of the 16th c., it was common for poets and critics to think of lyric (when they thought of it at all) as a loose collection of odes, idylls, paeans, and celebratory compositions; but in the same period, various verse genres began to be classified as lyric not only through a nostalgia for the ancient lyre but as a contemp. mode, as when George Puttenham distinguishes heroic, lyric, elegiac, and epigrammatic verse in his Arte of English Poesie (1589). Although the 16th and 17th cs. are often regarded as the era in which the lyric emerged and flowered across Europe, the lyric was one of many poetic varieties (as in Puttenham's list) and was often cast as the least important, the most occasional and ephemeral kind of poetry. Yet perhaps for this reason, Philip Sidney in his Defence of Poesy (pub. posthumously in 1595) responded to the marginalization of lyric verse by defending it in the strongest terms: "is it the Lyric that most displeaseth, who with his tuned lyre and well-accorded voice, giveth praise, the reward of virtue, to virtuous acts; who gives moral precepts, and natural problems; who sometimes raises up his voice to the height of the heavens, in singing the lauds of the immortal God?" Sidney's personification of lyric attests to the personal expressive power beginning to be accorded to the idea in the later 16th c. At the same time, Sidney's personified ideal is still associated with an archaic version of lyric performance. While med. songs may have followed their own elaborate generic protocols, in the Ren., the Horatian idealization of a lost age in which the "tuned lyre and well-accorded voice" performed in concert began to do the work of genre. With the rise of the sonnet after Petrarch, "the early modern sonnet becomes the semi-official vehicle of contemporaneous lyric, and both theory and commentary respond to it as a given," as Greene (1999) argues. "I esteem a sonnet by Petrarch more highly than all the romances," Antonio Minturno wrote in L'arte poetica (1563), and it is also true that mod. critics have esteemed the Ren. sonnet more highly than the many other verse genres that circulated so promiscuously in the period. In an influential late 20th-c. argument, Fineman proposed that what we call early modern lyric originated out of conventions of epideixis or praise (Sidney's "lyre and well-accorded voice [that] giveth praise"; see EPIDEICTIC POETRY). In Shakespeare's Sonnets, Fineman argued, those early mod. notions of idealized lang. break down and are replaced by a new model of lyric subjectivity in which the divided subject of modernity "experiences himself as his difference from himself." The sonnet's formal qualities enable this shift, according to Fineman, since the final couplet's turn can so aptly articulate a person at odds with himself.