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LYRIC

From "The Princeton Encyclopedia of and "

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 . 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 (, John Stuart Mill). A mod. invention, this idea of lyric has profoundly influenced how we understand the hist. of all poetic .

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 . 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 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 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 (Most). Thus, lyric was from its inception a term used to describe a 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 , Alcaeus, , and ) would not have understood this description. and 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 " (Lowrie). experimented with various meters to "suggest epigram or incipient rather than lyric proper" and brought sapphics into Lat. in his trans. of Sappho's fragment 31, but it is 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 and hymns and epigrams they wrote belong to genres specific to 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 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 verse, but the elaborate med. distinctions among the many genres of such verse (e.g., *chanson, , , , , , , , 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, 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 .

With the rise of the after , "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 , 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 's turn can so aptly articulate a person at odds with himself. Surely, Greene (1999) is right to suggest that "one needs to detach Fineman's argument from the text to which it emphatically joins itself and retell the unsettling of lyric subjectivity through many more examples over a larger time-line," but it is remarkable that critics who want to find the emergence of what we have come to think of as mod. lyric tend to locate its beginnings in the Ren. sonnet and in Shakespeare's sonnets, in particular. Perhaps this is because, as Hollander has observed, "by the 1580s, a variety of poetic conventions had become assimilated to the notion of the 'lyric poem,' including 'sonnets' in both the strict and loose senses … epigrams, pastoral lyrics and so forth." In other words, perhaps the tendency to locate the emergence of the mod. lyric in the Ren. sonnet may be traced to the sonnet's popularity and distinction as "one of the few instances in which a genre is defined in terms of a verse form," a distinction that allowed the sonnet to stand as a concrete instance of the beginning of a historical shift in the definition of the lyric from idea to genre (Dubrow).

In the 17th c., the early moments of that historical shift in the lyric's definition proved esp. felicitous. As Saintsbury memorably rhapsodized on the Eng. trad., "in this seventeenth century of ours England was a mere nest of singing birds, a nightingale's haunt in a centennial May." He went on to remark that "it is rather a temptation to the abstract critic to inquire why it was that lyric properly so called was later than the other kinds in our Renaissance." T. S. Eliot famously answered that "the poets of the seventeenth century, the successors of the dramatists of the sixteenth, possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of experience… . [I]n the seventeenth century a dissociation of sensibility set in, from which we have never recovered" ("The Metaphysical Poets," 1921). Eliot's move to date mod. poetics from the 17th c.—a move enormously influential for the New Criticism and perhaps not coincidentally parallel to Michel Foucault's chronology of modernity—may indeed have followed from a shift in sensibility, but it also followed from a shift in poetics, in which lyric became a more capacious category. That shift had been accomplished by the time that Eliot wrote in the 20th c., but its beginnings may be traced to the 17th c., a period in which short poems (often called songs) flourished in large part precisely because their marginalization as minor lit. in the 16th c. made the stakes of their composition and circulation so low. Remarkable amounts of verse circulated in ms., a practice that bound circulation to social relations and occasions. Those relations and occasions produced all kinds of poems—poems of imprisonment, poems for gift-giving, appeals for patronage, *parodies of popular poems, riddles for social diversion, libels or epigrams about known individuals—in all kinds of places; as Marotti remarks, such verse was written and read "not only on paper, but also on rings, on food trenchers, on glass windows (scratched with a pin or diamond), on paintings, on tombstones and monuments, on , and even (as graffiti) on London's Pissing Conduit." In this flourishing verse culture, the broad category of lyric was seldom invoked as an abstraction for such a varied array of short poems.

But, of course, (as Eliot suggested), the 17th c. was rife with anxiety about other categories, incl. (as Foucault suggested) the category of categories themselves. The promiscuous circulation of verse genres was checked and balanced by ambitious ideas about poetic genres. In Eng., 's great epic may be the most obvious instance of such ambition; if the lyric had not yet become one genre in the 17th c., the epic already seemed a belated genre in need of renewal. The 17th-c. poets that Eliot characterized (after Samuel Johnson) as *metaphysical poets were known in the period for their "strong lines," a term of disapprobation at the time. Throughout Europe and the colonial world, poets of many langs. associated with the baroque and mannerism made the short poem into a vehicle of philosophical speculation, a shift that sometimes demanded that the form of the verse be adapted to the argument. As wrote of the Psalms, poetry may take "such a form as is both curious, and requires diligence in the making, and then when it is made, can have nothing, no syllable taken from it, nor added to it"—a shift in structural conception that moved poetics toward the compositional principles that Goethe later associated with the "natural form" of the lyric. While lyric still functioned more as an idea than as a genre in the 17th c., ideas later to be associated with the lyric were already doing some of the work of genre in the period. That work was crystallized in two landmark publications by Nicolas Boileau that appeared together in 1674: a trans. of Longinus's Peri hypsous (On the Sublime) and the L'Art poétique. The neoclassicism of Boileau had an expanding influence on ideas about poetry at the end of the 17th and the beginning of the 18th cs. (see NEOCLASSICAL POETICS). Although the term iyric does not appear in On the Sublime, the rendering of the only surviving version of Sappho's fragment 31 in the text of Longinus made an influential argument for an emerging concept of a more organic poetic form in the latter part of the 17th c. After the final lines of the fragment, which Anne Carson has recently translated as

… tongue breaks, and thin fire is racing under skin and in eyes no sight and drumming fills ears and cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all, greener than grass I am and dead—or almost I seem to me. (Eros, the Bittersweet, 1998)

Longinus turns to his reader to ask, "Are you not amazed, how at one and the same moment [Sappho] seeks out soul, body, hearing, tongue, sight, complexion as if they had all left her and were external, and how in contradiction she both freezes and burns, is irrational and sane, is afraid and nearly dead, so that we observe in her not one single emotion but a concourse of emotions? … [I]t is her selection of the most important details and her combination of them into a single whole that have produced the excellence of the poem" (Campbell). As Prins has argued, Longinus turns Sappho into a lyric ideal by conflating " and poem: in his reading, Sappho is simultaneously losing composure and composing herself, falling apart in the poem and coming together as a poem that seems to speak, with heightened eloquence, to the reader." In part because of the circulation of Boileau's trans., the personified poetic force that Longinus attributed to fragment 31 established the sublime as a conceptual bridge from the late baroque and mannerism through neoclassicism to . The rage for Longinus not only enhanced and furthered Horace's idealization of Sappho's lyricism but pushed it in a new direction. In Boileau's trans., the identification between Sappho and her poem represents a further step in the devel. of an idea of the lyric as a genre of personal expression. Boileau's neoclassicism was also expressed in an Art of Poetry to rival Horace's, in which he repeats the Horatian formula with the added instruction that poetry be "solide" (sound), or governed by reasonable principles:

Qu'en savantes leçons votre muse fertile Partout joigne au plaisant le solide et l'utile. Un lecteur sage fuit un vain amusement Et veut mettre à profit son divertissement. (In prudent lessons everywhere abound, With pleasant join the useful and the sound; A sober reader a vain tale will slight, He seeks as well instruction as delight.) (4.86-89)

In Dryden's trans. as in Boileau's alexandrines, the emphasis on the "lecteur sage" or "sober reader" speaks volumes. By insisting on the centrality of reason in the composition and consumption of poetry, Boileau resisted the 16thand 17th-c. momentum toward making a passionate and personal lyrical idea into a mod. genre. Instead, his poetic lesson emphasized the eclogue, the elegy, the ode, , , heroic verse, and epic as genres that could appeal to the decorous reader at the same time that they might prove the dictum that "Un beau désordre est un effet de l'art" (A beautiful disorder is an effect of art, 2.72). This is to say that, while the trans. of Longinus helped to further an ideal of personal lyricism, L'art poétique made lyricism not a genre but an intentional effect of defined verse genres that were to follow reasonable protocols rather than be swept up in flights of personal expression.

I ndeed, the new neoclassical emphasis on generic decorum led the young Alexander Pope to publish an anonymous adaptation of Boileau's treatise in his versified Essay on Criticism (1711). Following Boileau, Pope attributed reasonable critical taste in verse genres to the principles of nature: First follow Nature, and your Judgment frame By her just Standard, which is still the same: Unerring Nature, still divinely bright, One clear, unchang'd and Universal Light, Life, Force, and Beauty, must to all impart, At once the Source, and End, and Test of Art.

It is often assumed that Pope and his Eur. contemporaries followed neoclassical prescriptions about the hierarchy of genres at the expense of the lyric, making much of the 18th c. into a nadir for lyric (excepting local trads. of *landscape, satiric, and discursive poetry) that would be redeemed only by romanticism. What Longinus meant by natural form was not what Pope and early 18th-c. poets meant by "Unerring Nature," a reasonable principle that dictated sharp distinctions among verse genres with specific social functions. The 18th-c. emphasis on "natural" social relations rather than on the transcendence of form has seemed in retrospect a marginalization or repression of the lyric. As Siskin has written (1994) with reference to England, if we think that the lyric flourished before and was repressed by the early 18th c., then "the history that results is that strange and developmental tale in which, after decades of dry reason, late 18th-c. Englishmen finally got in touch with their feelings" and revived the personal lyric as a vehicle of literary expression. One problem with that strange tale is that it supposes that, by the 18th c., the lyric had become a recognized poetic genre that could be marginalized by more decorous neoclassical verse genres. But the lyric was just emerging as a complex kind of verse, part idea and part genre, by the beginning of the century. What happened at different rates over the course of the 18th c. was that the archaic idea of poetic lyricism was pushed further away from the "just Standard" of genre, since that idea had begun to threaten to blur the lines between one category of verse and another.

In fact, it might be said that, rather than disappearing, the idea of lyric in Eng. and some other lits. had a lively career in the 18th c. precisely as a counterpoint to the hierarchy of verse genres. As Joseph Trapp wrote in his Lectures on Poetry Read in the Schools of Natural Philosophy at Oxford in the same year that Pope's Essay on Criticism circulated (1711), "As to the Nature of the Lyric Poem, it is, of all Kinds of Poetry, the most poetical; and is as distinct, both in Style, and Thought, from the rest, as Poetry in general is from ." On this view, the lyric became a genre that could transcend genre, both an alternative to and the realization of "all Kinds of Poetry." The kind of poetry most closely allied with this transcendent lyric ideal in the 18th c. was the ode, a term Trapp (like most critics in the period) uses interchangeably with lyric and a genre associated since the 17th c. with ancient lyricism. Abrams actually suggested in 1953 that "the soaring fortunes of the lyric may be dated to 1651, the year that Cowley's Pindaric 'imitations' burst over the literary horizon and inaugurated the immense vogue of the 'greater Ode' in England." By the middle of the century, the popularity of mod. versions of the ode (particularly those by William Collins and ) prompted Samuel Johnson to complain that the poets of odes modeled themselves on a primitive form of poetry written when the imagination was "vehement and rapid" and before science had been sufficiently developed to accustom the mind to close inspection and control: "From this accidental peculiarity of ancient writers, the criticks deduce the rules of lyrick poetry, which they have set free from all the laws by which other compositions are confined, and allow to neglect the niceties of transition, to start into remote digressions, and to wander without restraint from one scene of to another" (Rambler, no. 158 September 21, 1751). Trapp had actually also suggested that Pindar "and the rest of the Grecians, receiv'd their Learning from the Nations of the East, the Jews and Phoenicians, " thus not only granting the ode a transcendent lyricism but making it a transcendent vehicle of the hist. of civilization. Johnson turns that turn against itself in his complaint about the lyric's primitivism, but the notion that odes or lyrics (the terms were used practically as synonyms) were themselves vehicles of the hist. of culture would be influential for centuries to come. And perhaps the most important aspect of this turn is the symbiotic relationship between lyricism and crit.: "the criticks deduce the rules of lyrick poetry," according to Johnson, by not playing by the rules. At the same time, only a critic could understand the hist., significance, and value of that critical transgression—whether that critic valued it as did Trapp or disparaged it as did Johnson. As Siskin has written (1988), "from very early on, the English lyric has mixed with the critical, both in terms of poems being mixed with critical writing and in terms of the incorporation within those poems of critical features." But we could go further: since lyric had been an idea hovering over, among, and beneath various ideas of poetry for centuries, it rose in importance with the rise in importance of professional lit. crit. in the 18th c. Since all along the lyric had been more idea than genre, and in modernity became an idea that could transcend genre ("as distinct … from the rest, as Poetry is from Prose"), the idea of the lyric needed critics to understand and further it, and critics needed the slippery idea of the lyric as a field for debate.

Thus, the rise of the lyric as a mod. poetic ideal in the 18th c. went hand in hand with the lyricization of the ode and a shift in critical ideas of genre. As late as 1795, the Encyclopaedia Britannica defined by dividing it into three kinds: the Sublime ode, the Lesser ode, and the Song. Odes and songs were genres associated with specific social functions and occasions; lyric was an adjective that described an idea associated with those genres. Just as the sonnet was the representative genre aligned with lyric in the 16th c., and sonnets, odes, and songs were considered lyrical in the 17th c., throughout the 18th c. odes (greater and lesser, sublime or merely beautiful) and songs (set to music or as texts) were often the genres associated with an idea of lyric. Toward the end of the century, a tendency to divide lit. (itself a new category) into three distinct categories attached to large critical conceptions of generic functions rather than tied to a wide variety of actual social (or "natural") uses emerged, and these categories began to compete with the cultural work of particular genres. Although such critical division was an invention of the 18th and 19th cs., it claimed ancient origins, and later critics tend to forget that the late 18th c.'s move toward broad generic claims was not actually faithful to Aristotle or Plato or Horace or even to literary critics of early modernity (Genette). Instead, late 18th-c. poetics answered to a post-Enlightenment interest in systematic knowledge production that governed the emergence of the disciplines of natural science and economics (Poovey) and, thus, to a need to make the mobile lyric ideal into a defined genre with its own identifiable and exchangeable features and rules. So Johann A. Schlegel noted in Einschränkung der schōnen Kūnste auf einen einzigen Grundsatz (1751) that a division of literary works into "lyric, epic, and drama" would correspond to the "subjective, subjective-objective, and objective" forms of representation, and Friedrich Hölderlin wrote in Sämtliche Werke (1790) that "in the tragic lies the completion of the epic, in the lyric the completion of the tragic, in the epic the completion of the lyric." In a note to the West-östlicher Divan (1819), Goethe went further in proposing what would be an enormously influential rethinking not only of the lyric but of the system of genres that made the lyric into a new third party to a way of thinking about lit.:

One can combine these three elements [lyric, epic, dramatic] and get infinite variations on the poetic genres; that is why it is so hard to find an order by which to classify them side by side or in succession. One can, however, extricate oneself from the difficulty by setting the three main elements on a circle, equidistant from one another, and seeking exemplary works in which each element predominates separately. Then one can assemble examples that tend in one direction or the other, until finally the three come together and the circle is completely closed.

This division into a tripartite literary system in which the parts could work dialectically to form a coherent whole that corresponded to the whole of human comprehension ("subjective, subjective-objective, objective") or the entirety of literary possibility (when "the circle is completely closed") profoundly altered the literary critical function of literary genres and radically changed the understanding of lyric. When lyric shifted from its earlier uses as nostalgic adjective or transcendent idea to become part of a generic system, the hist. of poetic genres was, in turn, revised and rewritten.

In the 19th c., the new understanding of genre as hermeneutic rather than taxonomic generated large claims for the lyric as a vehicle of personal expression, but the theoretical social relations of self and other had not yet eclipsed the actual social relations in which verse was exchanged. The lyric was gradually transformed from an idea attached to various verse genres into an aesthetic ideal that eclipsed or embraced other verse genres, but the process was uneven. When Wordsworth and Coleridge called their 1798 collection of poems Lyrical Ballads, they nicely captured both sides of the coin of the "lyrical" currency in their era. "It is the honourable characteristic of Poetry," the Advertisement to the begins,

that its materials are to be found in every subject which can interest the human mind. The evidence of this fact is to be sought, not in the writings of Critics, but in those of Poets themselves.

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.

These distinctions between poets and critics and between "the language of conversation" and "poetic pleasure" speak to the direction of poetic discourse at the turn of the 19th c. On one hand, poetry is everywhere, but, on the other, it is imperative to distinguish between critical ideas about poetry and the practice of poets. On one hand, the poems this prose introduced "are to be considered experiments," not verse for particular occasions in particular genres; but, on the other, they borrow the lang. of the common people (who did exchange many particular genres on particular occasions) in order to make uncommon forms of "poetic pleasure." The Lyrical in the volume's title indicates the attempt to have poetics both ways —both aestheticized and common, both practical and theoretical. By 1798, then, lyric was coming to mean both the abstract genre that complemented the dramatic and the epic (i.e., the property of critics) and the essential poetry of the people (i.e., the original and expressive). The attempt in Lyrical Ballads to make both ways of understanding lyric work together was an index of how difficult it was to think about the lyric in both these ways at once.

As Abrams pointed out, that projection of "the lyric as poetic norm"—as the primary category for all poetry— began much earlier than Wordsworth's and Coleridge's "experiments," in the mid-18th-c. lyricization of the ode and the association of lyric with the primitive origins of civilization. According to Abrams, the 1772 publication of William Jones's Poems Consisting Chiefly of Translations from the Asiatick Languages, to which Are Added Two Essays I) On the Poetry of the Eastern Nations, and II) Essay on the Arts Called Imitative "deliberately set out to revise the bases of the neo-classic theory of poetry" and poetic genres. Jones did this, Abrams suggests, by weaving together "ideas drawn from Longinus, the old doctrine of poetic inspiration, recent theories of the emotional and imaginative origin of poetry, and a major emphasis on the lyric form and on the supposedly primitive and spontaneous poetry of Oriental nations." What the "Asiatick" primitive and spontaneous lyric shows, according to Jones, is that Aristotle was wrong: "poetry is not produced by Imitation, but by a very different principle; which must be sought for in the deepest recesses of the human mind." Thus, well before Lyrical Ballads was published, the association of the lyric with an expressive theory of culture complemented its abstraction in the new mod. system of genres. This is why the folk *"ballads" that were actually exchanged by all kinds of people for all kinds of reasons could be rendered "lyrical" when they ceased to be ballads and became "experiments." And this is why the 19th c. was the period in which the lyric became a transcendent genre by remaining an idea that could blur the differences among specific verse genres that were actually very much in use in the same period. This is also why there was not one kind of poem in the romantic period that could be definitively named the romantic lyric; instead, there was still a wide range of verse genres in popular circulation that were beginning to be theorized as lyric at the same time that romantic poets were mixing popular genres (ballads and hymns, odes and songs, epistles and ) under the sign of the lyric.

Thus, rather than consolidating a sense of poetry as iyric, the 19th-c. definition of the lyric was deeply confused—though this state of confusion guaranteed a long and productive life for the lyric in both practical use and literary critical hist. In the first decades of the 19th c., Hegel famously elevated the lyric to the summit of his Aesthetics, since, in the spirit of his age, he understood the lyric as at once the least material and the most completely expressive art. But Hegel also cast the lyric as the most difficult of mod. genres, since in it the poet must become "the centre which holds the whole lyric work of art together"; and in order to do so, he must achieve a "specific mood" and "must identify himself 'with this particularization of himself as with himself, so that in it he feels and envisages himself." The point of such repetitive assertions for Hegel was that what was at stake in the lyric was no less than the achievement of subjectivity: "In this way alone does [the poet] then become a self-bounded subjective entity" (Totalität). That attainment of subjective wholeness would represent not only perfect expression but the dialectical accomplishment of historical progress, since, in his expression, the poet moves us all forward toward enlightenment. This idealist version of the lyric had the advantage of bringing together both sides of the contemporaneous ideology of lyric as aesthetic form and lyric as culturally expressive potential. Yet it resolved the potential conflict between those two ways of understanding lyricism by pushing the lyric ideal that much further away from the practice of actual poets, toward a utopian horizon.

The notion that the lyric was an ideal poetic form that no poet had yet achieved actually proved a generative model for poetics in the 19th c. In "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties" (1833), Mill proclaimed that "lyric poetry, as it was the earliest kind, is also … more imminently and peculiarly poetry than any other: it is the poetry most natural to a really poetic temperament, and least capable of being successfully imitated by one not so endowed by nature." Here, Mill gathers the 18th-c. attribution of original or primal expression (already evident in Trapp and in Jones's antimimetic argument about "Asiatick" lyric) into the 19th-c. idealization of the lyric as subjective representation. Yet according to Mill, not even Wordsworth and P. B. Shelley, "the two English authors of our own day who have produced the greatest quantity of true and enduring poetry," could actually write lyric poetry that partook of both these qualities at once. While great, Mill laments that "the genius of Wordsworth is essentially unlyrical," and Shelley "is the reverse" in the sense that he had immense lyrical gifts but "had not, at the period of his deplorably early death, reached sufficiently far that intellectual progression of which he was capable." If for Hegel the ideal lyric poet would move civilization forward in his perfect self-expression, for Mill the ideal lyric poet would have to do two things no one had yet perfectly done: be the representative of both original nature and acquired culture. In "The Poet" (1844), R. W. Emerson echoed Mill's and Hegel's impossibly ideal characterizations of the lyric poet, casting that ideal as culturally democratic and Am., and lamenting that "I look in vain for the poet I describe." A young Walt Whitman was in the audience when Emerson gave his lecture in Brooklyn, and several years later claimed to be the poet of "lyric utterances" Emerson and Mill and Hegel and America had been looking for. To call the heroic poet of 19th-c. philosophy and Whitman's bravado lyric is to stretch the term very far indeed, but that is what happened to the definition of lyric in the second half of the 19th c. In the world of ideas, the lyric became "more imminently and peculiarly poetry than any other" verse genre, indeed, so much so that lyric and poetry began to be synonymous terms.

While the lyricization of all verse genres meant the creation of a lyric ideal in lit. crit., in the 19th-c. culture of mass print, lyric became a synonym for poetry in another sense by becoming a default term for short poems, a practical name for verse that did not obey the protocols of neoclassical genres such as the Pindaric ode or conform to the popular standards of ballads or hymns. While both neoclassical and popular genres persisted within the new print lyric, as Rowlinson has remarked, in the 19th c. "lyric appears as a genre newly totalized in print." In the titles of popular poetry volumes, lyric became the name for a generic alternative, as in Lays and Lyrics by Charles Gray (1841) or Legends and Lyrics by Adelaide Proctor (1863). These print uses of lyric shifted the sense of Lyrical Ballads (1798) or even of Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830) toward a simple noun that readers came to recognize. Both the expansion of lyric to describe all poetry in its ideal state and the shrinking of the term to fit print conventions and popular taste irked Poe, a writer always early to sense shifts or conflicts in the hist. of ideas. Before Whitman's "lyric utterances" stretched poetry beyond form, Poe declared in "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846) that "what we term a long poem is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones," since "a poem is such, only inasmuch as it intensely excites, by elevating, the soul; and all intense excitements are, through a psychal necessity, brief." Poe's emphasis on an affective definition of form reached back to Longinus and echoed Coleridge, but it also proved influential for later 19th-c. theories of lyricism. To define the lyric not as the perfection of subjective representation or as primal cultural expression but as momentary sensation again made the lyric a mobile concept, adaptable to various kinds of poetry.

In practice, while there were all sorts of poems labeled lyrics in print and many gestures toward the lyricism associated with musical performance, there were also all sorts of self-conscious departures from "the lyric" in the poetry of the second half of the 19th c.—so much so that there were few poems critics would call purely lyric. Tucker has suggested that Robert Browning's dramatic monologues have become models of what we now think of as lyric, since they represent fictional speakers, but he also suggests that the dramatic monologues "began as a dramatic response to lyric isolationism." Almost as soon as an ideal of personal lyric expression emerged in the 19th c., then, it was honored more often in the exception than as a rule.

By the end of the 19th c., the tendency to work variations on lyric in relation to social complexity moved toward an idea of lyric as a refuge from mod. life. In 1899, writing about the Fr. poets he called The Symbolist Movement in Literature, Arthur Symons asserted that "after the world has starved the soul long enough in the contemplation of the rearrangement of material things, comes the turn of the soul" to the lyric (see ). In the early 1890s, the first eds. of Emily Dickinson's poems produced an unexpected publishing sensation, since the poetry characterized in the first volume as "something produced absolutely without the thought of publication, and solely by expression of the writer's own mind" became a model of lyric expression protected from what one review called "the mass of popular print." After having been idealized in the first half of the 19th c. and reinvented in the second half, the lyric at the end of the century began to be set against a culture increasingly viewed as decadent. That shift did not mean that the idea of the lyric lost its legacy as a vehicle of cultural transmission, but it did mean that the vehicle changed character. E.g., in 1896, when Paul Laurence Dunbar's Lyrics of Lowly Life was published in a fancy print ed., lyrics could represent an innocent version of black culture removed from the realities of the turn into the 20th c. If Dickinson became a lyric representative by being isolated from the public in which her lyrics would circulate, Dunbar became another representative by personifying a culture imagined as less mod. than America in the last decade of the 19th c.

In the 20th c., famously suggested that, in the previous century, "Baudelaire envisaged readers to whom the reading of lyric poetry would present difficulties" ("On Some Motifs," 1939). According to Benjamin, "it is reasonable to assume that only in rare instances is lyric poetry in rapport with the experience of its readers." Benjamin's sense of the lyric in the 1930s was probably not Baudelaire's in the 1850s, but what is remarkable about Benjamin's characterization of Baudelaire's relation to his century's lyricism is his focus on the distance between modernity and the lyric. Those theories continued to reverse early 19th-c. idealizations of the lyric: rather than positioning the poet as the hero of the future, mod. theories of the lyric tended to further imagine it as a lost ideal, a kind of poetry rendered obsolete by recent hist. One early notable exception to this trend was the Am. theorist of poetics F. B. Gummere, who suggested in The Beginnings of Poetry (1901) that mod. lyric poets create "an imagined community" that replaces the loss of a true communal poetry in modernity. In a response to Benjamin's characterization of a mod. community out of sync with the tenor of lyric poetry, Theodor Adorno (in "Lyric Poetry and Society," originally pub. 1957, trans. into Eng. 1974) unwittingly echoed Gummere by proposing that "the universality of the lyric's substance … is social in nature" and suggested that since "the lyric work is always the subjective expression of a social antagonism," mod. poetry is in accord with the experience of its readers. Far from being distanced from mod. life, for Adorno the difficulties of mod. poetry could themselves be understood to represent the condition of alienation of mod. life. Gummere's, Benjamin's, and Adorno's definitions of the lyric were all essentially Hegelian, but the ways in which the lyric circulated in the 20th c. were more influenced by the messier hists. of mass print and verse experiment that had intervened since the early 19th c. than by such utopian ideas.

In the first decades of the 20th c., as in the previous century when lyric became an umbrella term for many different kinds of poetry, there was not one verse genre one could call the modern lyric; rather, there were various verse experiments in what later 20th-c. crit. increasingly cast as the alienation of the mod. lyric subject. and T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, W. C. Williams, and Wallace Stevens all wrote short poems we now call lyric, though they tended not to use that description of their work. As Eliot wrote in "The Three Voices of Poetry" (1957),

The term "lyric" itself is unsatisfactory. We think first of verse intended to be sung … But we apply it also to poetry that was never intended for a musical setting, or which we dissociate from its music ‥ The very definition of "lyric," in the Oxford Dictionary, indicates that the word cannot be satisfactorily defined: "Lyric: Now the name for short poems, usually divided into stanzas or , and directly expressing the poet's own thoughts and sentiments."

How short does a poem have to be, to be called a "lyric"? The emphasis on brevity, and the suggestion of division into stanzas, seem residual from the association of the voice with music. But there is no necessary relation between brevity and the expression of the poet's own thoughts and feelings.

Eliot goes on to define lyric in Mill's terms, as "the voice of the poet talking to himself," but his impatience with older definitions signals another shift in the mod. sense of the term, from Mill's impossible ideal of lyricism to the normal condition of each individual's fractured private thoughts. That shift was influential for the mid-century "confessional" poets (see ), who might be thought of as pure lyric poets in Eliot's sense; but, again, by that point in the century, the term iyric had become very broad, as it began to be used to describe all first-person poetry. If, in the first part of the 20th c., the notion of the lyric was still in flux, how did it become such a normative term by the middle of the century? In the hist. we have traced here, the idea of lyric began to do the work of a genre as early as the late 16th c., but it took 400 years before the lyric became synonymous with one poetic genre—or rather, 400 years before poetry was thought of as one lyricized genre. As the idea of genre itself changed in the 18th c., that shift advanced dramatically, but the discourses of poets and critics were not fully aligned in the 19th c., and the lyricization of poetry proceeded by fits and starts. It was only in the consolidation of 20th-c. lit. crit. that the process of lyricization was accomplished, and a broad idea of the lyric became exemplary for the reading of all poetry. That example emerged from and was reflected in the predominance of the New Criticism, which took up a model of the personal lyric close to Eliot's as the object of literary *close reading. In different ways, Am. critics such as Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren in the late 1930s, W. K. Wimsatt and M. C. Beardsley in the 1940s, and Reuben Brower in the 1950s assumed Eliot's definition of the personal lyric and used I. A. Richards's focus on individual poems in his "practical criticism" to forge a model of all poems as essentially lyric. That model was primarily pedagogical, but it became a way of reading that, in turn, influenced the way poems were written, and it remains the normative model for the production and reception of most poetry. Perhaps the most influential contemp. representative of this influential way of reading is Helen Vendler, who strongly advocates a definition of lyric as the personal expression of a fictional speaker, as "the genre that directs its toward the performance of the mind in solitary speech" (1997). Vendler believes that this "solitary" model of the lyric should be used to read all poetic genres at all moments in hist.

That model, while still assumed in much teaching of poetry, has since given way to poststructuralist critiques of lyric reading such as that of Paul de Man (like Vendler, a student of Brower, the New Critic who coined the phrase close reading), and to postmodernism and avant-garde poetics. When de Man wrote in "Anthropomorphism and Trope" in the late 20th c. that "the lyric is not a genre, but one name among several to designate the defensive motion of the understanding, the possibility of a future hermeneutics," he raised the question of how the lyric had become a matter of ^interpretation, a way of reading. The hist. of the lyric is the hist. of the ways an idea has become a genre and the ways in which that genre has been manipulated by poets and critics alike. As in earlier centuries, the late 20th-c. reaction to the elevation of the lyric as a mode of professional reading (what Poovey has called "the lyricization of ") became a reactionformation for and against a version of the lyric that could exist only in theory. In the 21st c., that purely theoretical sense of all postromantic personal poems as consistently lyric has prompted a critical and poetic turn away from a version of lit. hist. now retrospectively cast as consistent. In his intro. to the Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing (http://www.ubu.com/concept/), e.g., the poet and critic Craig Dworkin begins,

Poetry expresses the emotional truth of the self. A craft honed by especially sensitive individuals, it puts metaphor and image in the service of song.

Or at least that's the story we've inherited from Romanticism, handed down for over 200 years in a caricatured and mummified ethos—and as if it still made sense after two centuries of radical social change… . But what would a non-expressive poetry look like?

As we have seen, the story of the lyric has hardly been "caricatured and mummified" during its long hist., nor has the hist. of the lyric precluded many "non-expressive" elements in poetry—not even, or perhaps not esp., for the last 200 years. Instead, the story of the lyric charts the hist. of poetics. The lesson of that hist. is that lyric has not always named the same thing, but neither has one kind of poem simply changed its name many times over the course of the many centuries the term has been in use. As of this writing, there is still an active debate in lit. crit. over the definition of the lyric. Culler has recently suggested that we try to "prevent a certain narrowing of conception of the lyric and a tendency, understandable given the realities of literary education today, to treat lyric on the model of narrative, so that the dramatic monologue becomes the model of all lyric." Instead, he urges that we retain a transhistorical definition of the lyric because "thinking of lyric as transnational and broadly historical opens up critical possibilities," particularly the possibility of comparative lit. crit. Both Dworkin and Culler tell only partial accounts of lyric as a concept. A sense of either "a caricatured and mummified ethos" or of historical and cultural continuity will not render the intricate turns in the hist. of the lyric or of ideas associated with lyric. When that hist. becomes visible behind or beneath critical and poetic fictions, it testifies to the tremendous malleability of the term, to the ways in which the lyric persists as an idea of poetry fixed at points by lit. hist., often frozen by lit. crit., but as subject to change as the definition of poetry itself.

See POEM, POETRY.

ColeridgeS. T, Biographia Literaria (1817); G. Saintsbury, Seventeenth-Century Lyrics (1892); K. Burke, "On Musicality in Verse," The Philosophy of Literary Form (1941); Brooks; Abrams, "The Lyric as Poetic Norm"; Frye; C. Guillén, Literature as System (1971); M. Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge [1969], trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (1972); H. Gardner, The Metaphysical Poets (1972); W. Benjamin, , trans. H. Zohn (1973); H. Friedrich, The Structure of Modern Poetry, trans. J. Neugroschel (1974); A. Welsh, Roots of Lyric (1978); S. Cameron, Lyric Time: Dickinson and the Limits of Genre (1979); J. Culler, "Apostrophe," The Pursuit of Signs (1981); A. Fowler, Kinds of Literature (1982); D. A. Campbell, , Volume L: Sappho and Alcaeus (1982); W. R. Johnson, The Ldea ofLyric (1982); G. Most, "Greek Lyric Poets," Ancient Writers: and Rome (1982); P. de Man, The Rhetoric of Romanticism (1984); Hollander; Lyric Poetry: Beyond New Criticism, ed. C. Hosek and P. Parker (1985)—esp. H. Tucker, "Dramatic Monologue and the Overhearing of Lyric," and J. Culler, "Changes in the Study of the Lyric"; J. Fineman, Shakespeare's Perjured Eye (1986); J. Culler, "The Modern Lyric: Generic Continuity and Critical Practice," Comparative Perspective on Literature, ed. C. Koelb and S. Noakes (1988); C. Siskin, The Historicity of Romantic Discourse (1988); R. Greene, Post-Petrarchism (1991)—esp. the intro.; G. Genette, The Architext, trans. J. E. Lewin (1992); A. Grossman, "Summa Lyrica," The SightedSinger (1992); P. Zumthor, Toward a Medieval Poetics, trans. P. Bennett (1992); C. Siskin, "The Lyric Mix: Romanticism, Genre, and the Fate of Literature," Wordsworth Circle 25 (1994); A. Marotti, Manuscript, Print, and the English Renaissance Lyric (1995); M. Perloff, Wittgenstein's Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996); H. Vendler, The Art of Shakespeare's Sonnets (1997); R. Greene, "The Lyric," CHLC v. 3, ed. G. P. Norton (1999); Y. Prins, Victorian Sappho (1999); "The System of Genres in Troubadour Lyric," Medieval Lyric, ed. W. D. Paden (2000); M. Poovey, "The Model System of Contemporary Literary Criticism," CritL27 (2001); M. Rowlinson, "Lyric," A Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. R. CroninA. ChapmanH. A. Harrison (2002); S. Stewart, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses (2002); H. Vendler, Poets Thinking: Pope, Whitman, Dickinson, Yeats (2004); V. Jackson, Dickinson's Misery: A Theory of Lyric Reading (2005); H. Vendler, Lnvisible Listeners: Lyric Lntimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery (2005); M. Blasing, Lyric Poetry (2007); J. Culler, "Why Lyric?" PMLA 123 (2008); H. Dubrow, The Challenges of Orpheus (2008); R. von Hallberg, Lyric Powers (2008); R. Terada, "After the Critique of Lyric," PMLA 123 (2008); F. Budelmann, "Introducing Greek Lyric," Cambridge Companion to Greek Lyric (2009); M. Lowrie, "Lyric," Oxford Encyclopedia of and Rome, ed. M. Gargarin and E. Fantham (2010); J. Culler, "Genre: Lyric," Genre: Collected Essays from the English Lnstitute, ed. R. Warhol (2011).

V. JACKSON Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press

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