Lyric Poetry

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry that expresses feelings or personal sentiments, usually written in the third person. Unlike the other two, it is not necessarily equivalent to traditional song lyrics. Songs are created through a creative process of combining words and melody. Lyric poetry works on the same principle as song-writing, but with a different end result. Lyric poems are poems written for the lyre, while the song-writing is mostly done for the voice.

The most famous and influential lyricists include Goethe (iaries), German lyric poetry, William Shakespeare (acts, plays and verse writings), as well as William Wordsworth (volume 1, title page, iambic pentameter and sonnet). The word “Lyric” was first used in English in 1812 by writer and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson, and shortly thereafter by American poet Ralph Waldo Emerson. Alfred Lord Tennyson, another American poet, called his own poetry “the lyric kind”, and this name stuck. The term became increasingly common throughout the nineteenth century, and today “Lyric Poetry” is the term used to refer to a range of poems written in the third person. Most Lyric poems are written in the form of an ode, though some have been written in simple free verse.

The most popular forms of lyric writing are the odes and hexameters, which basically form the major components of a stanza. The ode is what is referred to as the introduction and will typically begin with a theme, i.e. an idea, motif, or point of reference. The hexameter is similar to the ode, in that the last five lines are called the hexameters of the stanza. A lyric poem will usually conclude with a line that repeats the entire theme or subject matter of the poem, but will vary depending on the individual poet.