Lyric poetry

From Poetry Wiki

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry that does not attempt to tell a story, as do epic poetry and dramatic poetry, but is of a more personal nature instead. Rather than portraying characters and actions, the lyric poet addresses the reader directly, portraying his or her own feelings, states of mind, and perceptions.

Although its name, from the word lyre, implies that it is meant to be sung, this is not always the case; much lyric poetry is purely meant to be read.

Contents 1 Themes 2 Forms 3 Metrics 4 Rhyme and alliteration 5 Principal lyric poets by period and language 5.1 Classical 5.1.1 Chinese poets 5.1.2 Greek poets 5.1.3 Japanese poets 5.1.4 Latin poets 5.1.5 Persian poets 5.2 Middle Ages and Renaissance 5.2.1 Chinese poets 5.2.2 English poets 5.2.3 French poets 5.2.4 German poets 5.2.5 Hebrew poets 5.2.6 Hindi poets 5.2.7 Italian poets 5.2.8 Persian poets 5.3 Sixteenth century 5.3.1 English poets 5.3.2 French poets 5.3.3 Spanish poets 5.4 Seventeenth century 5.4.1 Dutch poets 5.4.2 English poets 5.4.3 German poets 5.4.4 Japanese poets 5.5 Eighteenth century 5.5.1 English poets 5.5.2 German poets 5.5.3 Hebrew poets 5.5.4 Japanese poets 5.6 Nineteenth century 5.6.1 English poets 5.6.2 French poets 5.6.3 German poets 5.6.4 Italian poets 5.6.5 Japanese poets 5.6.6 Russian poets 5.6.7 Spanish poets 5.6.8 Swedish poets 5.7 Twentieth century 5.7.1 Bengali poets 5.7.2 Canadian poets 5.7.3 Chinese poets 5.7.4 Dutch poets 5.7.5 English poets 5.7.6 Flemish poets 5.7.7 French poets 5.7.8 German poets 5.7.9 Hebrew poets 5.7.10 Italian poets 5.7.11 Japanese poets 5.7.12 Polish poets 5.7.13 Portuguese poets 5.7.14 Russian poets 5.7.15 Spanish poets 5.8 Twenty-first century 5.8.1 Canadian poets

Themes

Although lyric poetry has a long and close association with love, and European lyric poetry in the vernacular arose with the courtly love tradition, it is not exclusively love poetry. Many of the courtly love poets (whether troubadors, trouvères, or Minnesänger) also wrote lyric poems about war and peace, nature and nostalgia, grief and loss. Notable among these are Christine de Pisan and Charles, Duke of Orléans, two of the great French lyric poets of the fifteenth century.

Spiritual themes are also prominent in lyric poetry. Some of the best medieval poets wrote exclusively religious poetry. Prominent among these are such poets as St. John of the Cross and Teresa of Avila. Note that it is sometimes hard to distinguish love poetry and religious poetry, since God and especially the Virgin Mary are often addressed in much the same terms as an earthly lover, and particularly like the noble lady in the courtly love tradition. Such modern poets as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot have continued the tradition of fine literary poetry based on spiritual or noumenous experience.

Nature is also a common theme of lyrical poetry, often being portrayed as a reflection of (or contrast to) the poet's state of mind.

Forms

Although arguably the most popular form of lyric poetry in the Western tradition is the 14-line sonnet, either in its Petrarchan or its Shakespearean form, lyric poetry appears in a bewildering variety of forms.

Ancient Hebrew poetry relied on repetition and chiasmus for many of its effects. Although much Greek and Roman classical poetry was written in forms with set meters and strophes, Pindar's odes seem as formless to the ear accustomed to rhyme and meter as such modern poetry as Rilke's Duino Elegies.

In some cases, the form and theme are wed, as in the courtly love aubade or dawn song in which lovers are forced to part after a night of love, often with the watchman's refrain telling them it is time to go. In other cases, the theme and form are at odds, and part of the interest of the poetry is in how and whether the poet can bring a successful union between two apparent opposites.

A common feature of lyric forms is the refrain, whether just one line or several, that ends or follows each strophe. The refrain is repeated throughout the poem, either exactly or with slight variation.

Metrics

Much lyric poetry depends on regular meter based either on number of syllables or on stress. The most common meters are as follows:

• Iambic - two syllables, with the long or stressed syllable following the short or unstressed syllable.
• Trochaic - two syllables, with the short or unstressed syllable following the long or stressed syllable.
• Anapestic - three syllables, with the first two short or unstressed and the last long or stressed.
• Dactylic - three syllables, with the first one long or stressed and the other two short or unstressed.

Some forms have a combination of meters, often using a different meter for the refrain.

Each meter can have any number of elements, called feet. The most common meter in English is iambic pentameter, with five iambs per line. The most common in French is the alexandrin, with twelve syllables. In English, the alexandrine is iambic hexameter.

Rhyme and alliteration

These two elements are common to structuring lyric poetry in the Western tradition and make poetry difficult to translate effectively. Old Norse poetry depended heavily on alliteration. Continental Europe and England developed complex rhyme schemes and used alliteration as an auxiliary device.

Although to the lay ear, rhyme is the hallmark of poetry, it has become less and less common in poetry in European languages in the twentieth century.

Principal lyric poets by period and language

This list includes the important lyric poets of each period, grouped together by language.

Classical

Chinese poets

• Bai Juyi
• Cao Cao
• Cao Pi
• Cao Zhi
• Cui Hao
• Du Fu
• Du Mu
• Fenggan
• Han Yu
• Hanshan
• Jia Dao
• Li Bai also known as Li Po
• Li Houzhu
• Li Qiao
• Li Qingzhao
• Li Shangyin
• Lu You
• Luo Binwang
• Mei Yaochen
• Meng Haoran
• Ouyang Xiu
• Pi Rixiu
• Su Shi
• Su Xiaoxiao
• Tao Qian
• Wang Wei
• Xie Lingyun

Greek poets

• Alcaeus
• Alcman
• Anacreon
• Archilochus
• Bacchylides
• Ibycus
• Mimnermus
• Pindar
• Sappho
• Stesichorus
• Theognis
• Xenophanes

Japanese poets

• Ono no Komachi
• Ariwara no Narihira
• Saigyo

Latin poets

• Catullus
• Horace
• Ovid

Persian poets

• Anvari
• Attar
• Ferdowsi
• Omar Khayyam
• Nezami
• Rudaki
• Asadi Tusi

Middle Ages and Renaissance

Chinese poets

• Gao Qi

English poets

• Geoffrey Chaucer

French poets

• William IX of Aquitaine
• Bertran de Born
• Arnaut Daniel
• Charles, Duke of Orléans
• Christine de Pisan
• Jaufre Rudel
• Bernart de Ventadorn
• François Villon

German poets

• Heinrich von Morungen
• Neidhart von Reuental
• Oswald von Wolkenstein
• Reinmar von Hagenau
• Ulrich von Liechtenstein
• Walther von der Vogelweide
• Wolfram von Eschenbach

Hebrew poets

• Yehuda Alharizi
• Yehuda Halevi
• Solomon Ibn Gabirol
• Abraham ibn Ezra

Hindi poets

• Kabir
• Surdas
• Tulsidas

Italian poets

• Dante Alighieri
• Guido Cavalcanti
• Francesco Petrarca
• Torquato Tasso
• Ludovico Ariosto

Persian poets

• Hafez
• Amir Khusro
• Auhadi of Maragheh
• Alisher Navoi
• Obeid e zakani
• Mahmud Shabistari
• Khaqani Shirvani

Sixteenth century

English poets

• Thomas Campion
• Walter Raleigh
• William Shakespeare
• Philip Sidney
• Edmund Spenser

French poets

• Joachim Du Bellay
• Pierre de Ronsard

Spanish poets

• Teresa of Avila
• Saint John of the Cross
• Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
• Garcilaso de la Vega
• Lope de Vega

Seventeenth century

Dutch poets

• Joost van den Vondel

English poets

• John Donne
• John Dryden
• George Herbert
• Robert Herrick
• Ben Jonson
• Andrew Marvell
• John Milton
• Henry Vaughan

German poets

• Martin Opitz

Japanese poets

• Matsuo Bashō

Eighteenth century

English poets

• Robert Burns
• William Cowper
• Thomas Gray
• Oliver Goldsmith

German poets

• Johann Wolfgang Goethe
• Novalis
• Friedrich Schiller
• Johann Heinrich Voß

Hebrew poets

• Moshe Chaim Luzzatto

Japanese poets

• Kobayashi Issa

Nineteenth century

English poets

• Matthew Arnold
• William Blake
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Robert Browning
• George Gordon, Lord Byron
• Samuel Taylor Coleridge
• Emily Dickinson
• Ralph Waldo Emerson
• Thomas Hardy
• Oliver Wendell Holmes
• Gerard Manley Hopkins
• John Keats
• Rudyard Kipling
• D. H. Lawrence
• Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
• George Meredith
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Christina Rossetti
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Algernon Charles Swinburne
• Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• Walt Whitman
• John Greenleaf Whittier
• William Wordsworth

French poets

• Charles Baudelaire
• Tristan Corbière
• Théophile Gautier
• Victor Hugo
• Jules Laforgue
• Stéphane Mallarmé
• Alfred de Musset
• Gerard de Nerval
• Arthur Rimbaud
• Paul Verlaine
• Alfred de Vigny

German poets

• Achim von Arnim
• Clemens Brentano
• Joseph von Eichendorff
• Hoffmann von Fallersleben
• Heinrich Heine
• Friedrich Hölderlin
• Gottfried Keller
• Eduard Mörike
• Ludwig Tieck
• Ludwig Uhland

Italian poets

• Ugo Foscolo
• Giacomo Leopardi
• Giovanni Pascoli
• Gabriele D'Annunzio

Japanese poets

• Taneda Santoka
• Masaoka Shiki
• Ishikawa Takuboku

Russian poets

• Mikhail Lermontov
• Aleksandr Pushkin
• Ivan Turgenev

Spanish poets

• Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer
• Rosalía de Castro
• José de Espronceda

Swedish poets

• Karl August Nicander
• Edith Sodergran

Twentieth century

Bengali poets

• Rabindranath Tagore
• Jibanananda Das
• Kazi Nazrul Islam

Canadian poets

• Al Purdy
• Irving Layton
• P.K. Page
• Margaret Avison
• Alden Nowlan
• Milton Acorn
• George Bowering
• Dennis Lee
• Margaret Atwood
• Michael Ondaatje
• Gwendolyn McEwen

Chinese poets

• Guo Moruo
• Mu Dan
• Xu Zhimo

Dutch poets

• François Haverschmidt
• Hendrik Marsman
• J. Slauerhoff

English poets

• W. H. Auden
• Hart Crane
• E. E. Cummings
• T. S. Eliot
• Robert Frost
• Allen Ginsberg
• Robert Graves
• Geoffrey Hill
• A. E. Housman
• Langston Hughes
• Ted Hughes
• C. Day Lewis
• Robert Lowell
• Archibald MacLeish
• Louis MacNeice
• Marianne Moore
• Wilfred Owen
• Sylvia Plath
• Ezra Pound
• Edwin Arlington Robinson
• Theodore Roethke
• Edna St. Vincent Millay
• Carl Sandburg
• Siegfried Sassoon
• Edith Sitwell
• Stephen Spender
• Wallace Stevens
• Sara Teasdale
• Dylan Thomas
• Robert Penn Warren
• William Carlos Williams
• William Butler Yeats
• Shel Silverstein

Flemish poets

• Hugo Claus
• Jotie T'Hooft

French poets

• Guillaume Apollinaire
• Louis Aragon
• André Breton
• Paul Eluard
• Max Jacob
• Saint-John Perse
• Paul Valéry

German poets

• Gottfried Benn
• Bertolt Brecht
• Paul Celan
• Stefan George
• Rainer Maria Rilke

Hebrew poets

• Yehuda Amichai
• Hayyim Nahman Bialik
• Leah Goldberg
• Rachel
• Avraham Shlonsky
• Shaul Tchernichovsky

Italian poets

• Grazyna Miller
• Eugenio Montale
• Giuseppe Ungaretti
• Cesare Pavese
• Pier Paolo Pasolini
• Edoardo Sanguineti

Japanese poets

• Yosano Akiko
• Wakayama Bokusui
• Kenji Miyazawa
• Noguchi Yonejiro

Polish poets

• Czesław Miłosz

Portuguese poets

• Fernando Pessoa

Russian poets

• Alexander Blok
• Nikolay Gumilyov
• Anna Akhmatova
• Marina Tsvetaeva
• Osip Mandelstam
• Vladimir Nabokov
• Boris Pasternak
• Joseph Brodsky

Spanish poets

• Vicente Aleixandre
• Luis Cernuda
• Rubén Darío
• Federico García Lorca
• Antonio Machado
• Gabriela Mistral
• Pablo Neruda
• Octavio Paz

Twenty-first century

Canadian poets

• Todd Swift
• George Murray
• Ken Babstock
• Paul Vermeersch
• Anne Carson

cs:Lyrická poezie

fr:Poésie lyrique io:Liriko it:Poesia lirica he:שירה לירית ja:抒情詩 ru:Лирика sh:Lirika sv:Lyrik