LYRICAL POETRY, a general term for all poetry which is, or can be supposed to be, susceptible of being sung to the accompaniment of a musical instrument. In the earliest times it may be said that all poetry was of its essence lyrical. The primaeval oracles were chanted in verse, and the Orphic and Bacchic Mysteries, which were celebrated at Eleusis and elsewhere, combined, it is certain, metre with music. Homer and Hesiod are each of them represented with a lyre, yet, if any poetry can be described as non-lyrical, it is surely the archaic hexameter of the Iliad and the Erga. These poems were styled epic, in direct contra-distinction to the lyric of Pindar and Bac chylides, but inexactly, since it is plain that they were recited, with a plain accompaniment on a stringed instrument. However, the distinction between epical and lyrical, between Ta what was said, and r a ,uan, what was sung, is accepted, and neither Homer nor Hesiod is among the lyrists. It is, however, as Hegel insists, the personal thought, or passion, or inspiration, which gives its character to lyrical poetry, while the metrical form is also to be taken into consideration. Since, as a rule, the lyric is short, its lines attain unusual speed and direction. It may be said that the lyric is a direct, arrow-like flight, a spontaneous flash of emo tion which makes its own music.
There was an early distinction, soon accentuated in Greece, be tween the poetry chanted by a choir of singers, and the song which expressed the sentiments of a single poet. The latter, the OXos or song proper, had reached a height of technical perfec tion in "the Isles of Greece, where burning Sappho loved and sung," as early as the 7th century B.C. That poetess, and her con temporary Alcaeus, divide the laurels of the pure Greek song of Dorian inspiration. By their side, and later, flourished the great poets who set words to music for choirs, Alcman, Anion, Ste sichorus, Simonides and Ibycus, who lead us at the close of the 5th century to Bacelylides and Pindar, in whom the tradition of the dithyrambic odes reached its highest splendour of development. The practice of Pindar and Sappho, we may say, has directed the course of lyrical poetry ever since, and will, unquestionably, con tinue to do so. They discovered how, with the maximum of art, to pour forth strains of personal magic and music, whether in a public or a private way. The ecstasy, the uplifted magnificence, of lyrical poetry could go no higher than it did in the unmatched harmonies of these old Greek poets, but it could fill a much wider field and be expressed with vastly greater variety. This was proved even in their own age. The gnomic verses of Theognis were certainly sung ; so were the satires of Archilochus and the romantic reveries of Mimnermus.
At the Renaissance, when the traditions of ancient life were taken up eagerly, and hastily comprehended, it was thought proper to divide poetry into a diversity of classes. The earliest English critic who enters into a discussion of the laws of prosody, William Webbe, lays it down, in 1586, that in verse "the Inost usual kinds are four, the heroic, elegiac, iambic and lyric." Similar confusion of terms was common among the critics of the 15th and 16th centuries, and led to considerable error. It is plain that a border
ballad is heroic, and may yet be lyrical; here the word "heroic" stands for "epic." It is plain that whether a poem is lyrical or not had nothing to do with the question whether it is composed in an "iambic" measure. Finally, it is undoubted that the early Greek "elegies" were sung to an accompaniment on the flute. Thus a poem may be heroic, iambic, or elegiac, and at the same time, in all senses of the word, lyrical.
More difficulty is met with in the case of the sonnet, for al though no piece of verse, when it is inspired by subjective passion, fits more closely with Hegel's definition of what lyrical poetry should be, yet the rhythmical complication of the sonnet, and its rigorous uniformity, seem particularly ill-fitted to interpretation on a lyre. When F. M. degli Azzi put the book of Genesis ( I7oo) into sonnets, and Isaac de Benserade the Metamorphoses of Ovid (1676) into rondeaux, these eccentric and laborious versifiers pro duced what was epical rather than lyrical poetry, if poetry it was at all. But the sonnet as Shakespeare, Wordsworth and even Petrarch used it was a cry from the heart, a subjective confession, and although there is perhaps no evidence that a sonnet was ever set to music with success, yet there is no reason why that might not be done without destroying its sonnet-character.
Jouffroy was perhaps the first aesthetician to see quite clearly that lyrical poetry is, really, nothing more than another name for poetry itself, that it includes all the personal and enthusiastic part of what lives and breathes in the art of verse, so that the divisions of pedantic criticism are of no real avail to us in its con sideration. We recognize a narrative or epical poetry; we recog nize drama ; in both of these, when the individual inspiration is strong, there is much that trembles on the verge of the lyrical. But outside what is pure epic and pure drama, all, or almost all, is lyrical. Complexity of form, rhythmical and stanzaic, takes in most lyrics much of the place which was taken in antiquity by such music as Terpander is supposed to have supplied. In a per fect lyric by a modern writer the instrument is the metrical form, to which the words have to adapt themselves. There is perhaps no writer who has ever lived in whose work this phenomenon may be more fruitfully studied than it may be in the songs and lyrics of Shelley. The temper of such pieces as "Arethusa" and "The Cloud" is indicated by a form hardly more ambitious than a guitar; "Hellas" is full of passages which suggest the harp; in his songs Shelley touches the lute or viola da gamba, while in the great odes to the "West Wind" and to "Liberty" we listen to a verse form which reminds us by its volume of the organ itself. On the whole subject of the nature of lyric poetry no commentary can be more useful to the student than an examination of the lyrics of Shelley in relation to those of the song-writers of ancient Greece.
See Hegel, Die Phdnomenologie des Geistes (1807) ; T. S. Jouffroy, Cours d'esthetique (1843) ; W. Christ, Metrik der Griechen and Romer (2nd ed. 1879) ; John Drinkwater, The Lyric (1916).