Lyric poetry

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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 5.1.2 Greek 5.1.3 Latin 5.2 Middle Ages and Renaissance 5.2.1 Chinese 5.2.2 Japanese 5.2.3 German 5.2.4 Hebrew 5.2.5 Hindi 5.2.6 Italian 5.2.7 Persian 5.2.8 English 5.2.9 French 5.3 Sixteenth century 5.3.1 English 5.3.2 French 5.3.3 Spanish 5.4 Seventeenth century 5.4.1 Dutch 5.4.2 English 5.4.3 German 5.4.4 Japanese 5.5 Eighteenth century 5.5.1 English 5.5.2 German 5.5.3 Hebrew 5.5.4 Japanese 5.6 Nineteenth century 5.6.1 English 5.6.2 French 5.6.3 German 5.6.4 Italian 5.6.5 Japanese 5.6.6 Russian 5.6.7 Spanish 5.6.8 Swedish 5.7 Twentieth century 5.7.1 Bengali 5.7.2 Canadian 5.7.3 Chinese 5.7.4 Dutch 5.7.5 English 5.7.6 Flemish 5.7.7 German 5.7.8 Hebrew 5.7.9 Italian 5.7.10 Japanese 5.7.11 Polish 5.7.12 Portuguese 5.7.13 Russian 5.7.14 Spanish 5.7.15 Turkish 5.8 Twenty-first century 5.8.1 American 5.8.2 Canadian

Lyric poetry is a form of poetry that does not attempt to tell a story, as do epic poetry 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. Most lyric poetry is made in a singable and rhymable way, although some lyric poems can be excepted.

[edit] 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 troubadours, 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 poets as John Donne, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot provide examples of fine literary poetry based on spiritual or numinous 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.

[edit] 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 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.

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.

[edit] 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.

[edit] 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 became less and less common in poetry in European languages in the twentieth century.

[edit] Principal lyric poets by period and language

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

[edit] Classical

[edit] Chinese see also:The Songs of Chu Cao Cao Cao Pi Cao Zhi Su Xiaoxiao Tao Qian Xie Lingyun

[edit] Greek see also:Nine lyric poets Alcaeus Alcman Anacreon Bacchylides Ibycus Mimnermus Pindar Sappho Stesichorus

[edit] Latin see also:The Neoteroi Catullus Horace Ovid

[edit] Middle Ages and Renaissance

[edit] Chinese see also Chinese Sanqu poetry Gao Qi Wang Wei Su Shi Li Shangyin Lu You Luo Binwang Mei Yaochen Meng Haoran Ouyang Xiu Du Fu Fenggan Hanshan Jia Dao Li Bai also known as Li Po Li Houzhu Bai Juyi

[edit] Japanese see also:Waka (poetry) Ono no Komachi Ariwara no Narihira

[edit] German see also:Minnesang Heinrich von Morungen Neidhart von Reuental Oswald von Wolkenstein Reinmar von Hagenau Ulrich von Liechtenstein Walther von der Vogelweide Wolfram von Eschenbach

[edit] Hebrew Yehuda Halevi Solomon Ibn Gabirol Abraham ibn Ezra

[edit] Hindi see also:Bhajan Kabir Surdas Tulsidas

[edit] Italian Dante Alighieri Guido Cavalcanti Francesco Petrarca Torquato Tasso Ludovico Ariosto

[edit] Persian see also:Ghazal Hafez Amir Khusro Auhadi of Maragheh Alisher Navoi Obeid e zakani Khaqani Shirvani Anvari Attar Omar Khayyam Rudaki

[edit] English Geoffrey Chaucer

[edit] French see also:Trouvère,Troubadour William IX of Aquitaine Bertran de Born Arnaut Daniel Charles, Duke of Orléans Christine de Pisan Jaufre Rudel Bernart de Ventadorn François Villon

[edit] Sixteenth century

[edit] English Thomas Campion Walter Raleigh William Shakespeare Philip Sidney Edmund Spenser

[edit] French see also:La Pléiade Joachim Du Bellay Pierre de Ronsard

[edit] Spanish Teresa of Avila Saint John of the Cross Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Garcilaso de la Vega Lope de Vega

[edit] Seventeenth century

[edit] Dutch Joost van den Vondel

[edit] English see also:Cavalier poets John Donne John Dryden George Herbert Robert Herrick Ben Jonson Andrew Marvell John Milton Henry Vaughan

[edit] German Martin Opitz

[edit] Japanese Matsuo Bashō

[edit] Eighteenth century

[edit] English Robert Burns William Cowper Thomas Gray Oliver Goldsmith

[edit] German Johann Wolfgang Goethe Novalis Friedrich Schiller Johann Heinrich Voß

[edit] Hebrew

[edit] Japanese Kobayashi Issa

[edit] Nineteenth century

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

[edit] French 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

[edit] German see also:Lieder Achim von Arnim Clemens Brentano Joseph von Eichendorff Hoffmann von Fallersleben Heinrich Heine Friedrich Hölderlin Gottfried Keller Eduard Mörike Ludwig Tieck Ludwig Uhland

[edit] Italian Ugo Foscolo Giacomo Leopardi Giovanni Pascoli Gabriele D'Annunzio

[edit] Japanese Taneda Santoka Masaoka Shiki Ishikawa Takuboku

[edit] Russian Mikhail Lermontov Aleksandr Pushkin Ivan Turgenev

[edit] Spanish Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer Rosalía de Castro José de Espronceda

[edit] Swedish Karl August Nicander Edith Sodergran

[edit] Twentieth century

[edit] Bengali Rabindranath Tagore Jibanananda Das Kazi Nazrul Islam

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

[edit] Chinese Guo Moruo Mu Dan Xu Zhimo

[edit] Dutch François Haverschmidt Hendrik Marsman J. Slauerhoff

[edit] English see also Georgian Poetry 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

[edit] Flemish Hugo Claus Jotie T'Hooft André Breton Paul Eluard Max Jacob Saint-John Perse Paul Valéry

[edit] German Gottfried Benn Bertolt Brecht Paul Celan Stefan George Rainer Maria Rilke Mrs.Elsa Kazi

[edit] Hebrew Yehuda Amichai Hayyim Nahman Bialik Leah Goldberg Rachel Avraham Shlonsky Shaul Tchernichovsky

[edit] Italian Grazyna Miller Eugenio Montale Giuseppe Ungaretti Cesare Pavese Pier Paolo Pasolini Edoardo Sanguineti

[edit] Japanese Yosano Akiko Wakayama Bokusui Kenji Miyazawa Noguchi Yonejiro Beth Isaacs

[edit] Polish Maria Pawlikowska-Jasnorzewska Czesław Miłosz

[edit] Portuguese Fernando Pessoa

[edit] Russian Alexander Blok Nikolay Gumilyov Anna Akhmatova Marina Tsvetaeva Osip Mandelstam Vladimir Mayakovsky Vladimir Nabokov Boris Pasternak Joseph Brodsky

[edit] Spanish Vicente Aleixandre Luis Cernuda Rubén Darío Federico García Lorca Antonio Machado Gabriela Mistral Pablo Neruda Octavio Paz

[edit] Turkish Melih Cevdet Anday Ece Ayhan Ilhan Berk Edip Cansever Nazim Hikmet Attila Ilhan Orhan Veli Kanik Cemal Süreya Can Yücel

[edit] Twenty-first century

[edit] American S. Donovan Mullaney Erika Sanchez

[edit] Canadian Todd Swift George Murray Ken Babstock Paul Vermeersch Anne Carson