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Lyric poetry. Lyric poetry refers to the broad category of poetry that concerns feelings and emotion. This distinguishes it from two other poetic categories: epic and dramatic. Learn more about lyric poetry here.

Let us further discuss here about lyric poetry. As you can remember, we also tackled this type of poetry in the previous chapters of this guide book.

A lyric poem is a short, emotionally expressive poem with a songlike quality that is narrated in the first person. Unlike narrative poetry, which recounts events and tells a story, lyric poetry explores the emotions of the speaker of the poem. Lyric poetry originated in ancient Greek literature and was originally intended to be set to music, accompanied by a musical instrument called a lyre, which resembles a small harp. Lyric poetry traditionally follows strict formal rules, but because there have been many different types of lyric poetry over centuries, there are now various different forms of lyric poetry.

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle created three distinctions of poetry: lyrical, dramatic, and epic. The lyric poem, in ancient Greece, was specifically meant to be accompanied by music from a lyre. The Greek poet Pindar was one of the first famous lyric poets. When Romans translated lyric poetry to Latin in the classical period, and the poems came to be recited and not sung, the meter and structure of the poems remained. In Europe, during the Renaissance, poets created lyric poetry with influence from ancient Greece, Persia, and China.

In the sixteenth century, William Shakespeare popularized lyric poetry in England. It remained dominant in the seventeenth century thanks to poets like Robert Herrick, and later, in the nineteenth century, through the work of poets including Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and later on in the century, Alfred Lord Tennyson.

Lyric poetry only began to go out of style with the arrival of modernist poets like Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, who questioned its relevance and rebelled against its constraints.

There are poetic meters that this type of poetry used.
Lyric poetry follows a formal structure that dictates a rhyme scheme, meter, and verse form, but there is a lot of variety in the types of meter poets choose to follow. The most common meters used in lyric poetry include:

Iambic meter. In poetry, an iamb is a two-syllable “foot” with stress on the second syllable. Iambic pentameter, by far the most common lyric form in English lyric poetry, is a meter in which each line has five iambs. Think of the rhythm as sounding like a heartbeat: da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM, da-DUM. For example, take this line from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet:

But soft! What light through yonder window breaks?

Trochaic meter. Trochaic meter is the inverse of iambic meter. Each trochaic foot, or trochee, consists of a long, stressed syllable followed by a short, unstressed syllable: DUM-da. In trochaic tetrameter, each line has four trochaic feet: DUM-da, DUM-da, DUM-da, DUM-da. For example, take this passage spoken by Oberson in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream:

Flower of this purple dye,
Hit with Cupid's archery,
Sink in apple of his eye.
When his love he doth espy,
Let her shine as gloriously
As the Venus of the sky.
When thou wakest, if she be by,
Beg of her for remedy.

Phyrric meter. This meter consists of two unstressed syllables, also known as a dibrach. Phyrric meter is not enough on its own to construct an entire poem but appears when the rhythm of a line has two short syllables followed by longer, stressed syllables. It is notated as “da-dum.” Not all poets agree with the classification of a Pyrrhic meter. Edgar Allen Poe, for example, negated the existence of Pyrrhic meter, saying that “The pyrrhic is rightfully dismissed. Its existence in either ancient or modern rhythm is purely chimerical…” However, the poet Alfred Lord Tennyson used Pyrrhic meter frequently. For example, in this line from his poem In Memoriam, notice how the words “when the” and “and the” are two soft, unstressed syllables: