Lyric Poetry

Explore the glossary of poetic terms.

Lyric poetry refers to a short poem, often with songlike qualities, that expresses the speaker’s personal emotions and feelings. Historically intended to be sung and accompany musical instrumentation, lyric now describes a broad category of non-narrative poetry, including elegies, odes, and sonnets.

History of Lyric Poetry:

Lyric poetry began as a fixture of ancient Greece, classified against other categories of poetry at the time of classical antiquity: dramas (written in verse) and epic poems. The lyric was far shorter, distinguished also by its focus on the poet’s state of mind and personal themes rather than narrative arc.

Most typically accompanying the lyre, a harp-like instrument from which lyric poetry derives its name, these poems would also be sung to other instruments and other times recited. Classical musician-poets from the Archaic Greek period include Sappho, one of the most widely regarded lyric poets of all time. Her lyric, numbered “XII,” begins:

In a dream I spoke with the Cyprus-born,

And said to her,

“Mother of beauty, mother of joy,

Why hast thou given to men

“This thing called love, like the ache of a wound

In beauty's side,

To burn and throb and be quelled for an hour

And never wholly depart?“

Lyric poetry appears in a variety of forms, the most popular of which is arguably the sonnet: traditionally, a fourteen-line poem written in iambic pentameter. Sir Thomas Wyatt and of course William Shakespeare helped popularize the classical form for English audiences. William Wordsworth’s “The World Is Too Much With Us” is a great example of a sonnet adapted, at the time, for the 19th century.

The ode, a formal address to an event, a person, or a thing not present, is another common branch of lyric poetry. There are three typical types of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and Irregular. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” is a great example of a Pindaric and one of the most celebrated odes of the English language.

Other famous examples of lyric poems include Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven,” Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “My Lost Youth,” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Ode to Dejection.”

More About Lyric Poetry

The Academy of American Poets Chancellors Mark Doty, Linda Gregerson, and Jane Hirshfield discusses the history of the lyric poem in this video.

Related Resources

We all know that poetry is not one thing; the spectrum from lyric to narrative in the category of "poem" is vast and encompasses much; so, too, the spectrum of formal to freer verse. The same goes for song, for music itself. So some of the ongoing discussions and debates about whether or not this or that song is also a poem, or this or that songwriter is also a poet intrigue and vex me in equal parts because I haven’t felt the attraction to debating the borders of genre, or, more important, to making some definitive decision about the topic.—Claudia Emerson in “Lyric Impression, Muscle Memory, Emily, and the Jack of Hearts”

I blinked, of course. This is the question essential to the lyric poem: how to make the particular universal, or, better said, how to discover the universal in the particular. Every poem is an attempt to answer this question, and when we are confronted with questions of such magnitude and scope, it is often best to defer to something that has—as Rilke says we must—lived those questions to their depths.—Joseph Fasano in “Supernovae and Dark Stars: Some Notes on Universality in the Lyric Poem”

Eros is often the fuel of the lyric imagination, which chooses to use words, sentences, musical structures of language to re/member the beloved, to enter that inexhaustible source of—not uniquely "carnal"—knowledge which is another person's body and mind.—“Eros and the Lyric Imagination: Poems of Love”