At the time, these poems were often written about certain gods and goddesses. Religious – Lyric poems often had a religious purpose and were crafted into hymns and other songs for purposes of worship.Soldiers – Valor and bravery amongst soldiers was highly prized, so lyric poems were often written to inspire these traits.The Dead – Another popular subject of a lyric poem is that they were often written to eulogize the deceased.Athletics – People often wrote lyric poems about victories in athletics, usually at organized games like the Ancient Olympic Games.Rather, they reserved this type of poem for certain events. They didn’t really write about how they felt in their daily lives. The Ancient Greeks had a tendency to write lyric poems concerning certain topics. Later on in European history, other instruments came about that were referred to as lyres but didn’t really look like the lyres of Ancient Greece. It is thought to have had 4, 7, or even 10 strings, which were either plucked or strummed with a bow. However, it is important to note that a formal description of the lyre as it appeared in Ancient Greece hasn’t been found. Think of the lyre not as a type of guitar, but as a small, hand-held harp.
The word, lyric, is said to have originated from the word, lyre, which was a type of stringed instrument that was commonly used by poets in Ancient Greece. If no specific subject is being named, we usually assume that the speaker of the poem is the poet. Sometimes the subject of the poem will actually be the poet but in other instances, the subject will be the individual who is narrating the poem (if it isn’t the poet). Being a separate entity, far from denigrating lyrics, allows us to measure them on their own terms.According to Merriam-Webster, lyric as it pertains to poetry is defined as, “expressing direct usually intense personal emotion especially in a manner suggestive of song.” It is said to be a type of poem that expresses the personal thoughts and feelings of the individual who is the subject of the poem. Kevin Young, writing in Bookforum’s music issue, is right when he suggests that such an expansion of the term “risks reducing poetry to little more than a free-floating feeling.” Prose, though it can also be poetic, isn’t poetry, and no one complains about that.
But while some lyricists, notably many in hip-hop, are remarkably poetic, it seems pointless-and even harmful-to insist on lyrics as poetry. (Appropriately: the word poetry is derived from the Greek verb “poiein,” meaning “to make.”) So to deny the label to song lyrics does seem like a value judgment. Most of us casually use the term “poetry” to refer to almost anything we consider beautifully made, from a cake to a sunset to a well-executed double Salchow. It is clear which of these was originally written to music, and not only because of the lack of rhyme in “21.”
Take, for example, the opening lines of “Visions of Johanna,” by Bob Dylan, who has long been acclaimed as one of our most poetic songwriters:ĭeath silenced her pool the day she died hovered over her little toy dogs but left no trace of itself at her funeral Even for those of us who are more literary-minded, seeing lyrics written on a page often diminishes whatever pleasure they gave when embedded in the context of a song. And yes, to some extent, the more we define what is poetry and what it isn’t, the more of an uncommon, niche experience it becomes.īut ask a musician what he or she first hear in a song and the answer is never the words. The first poems may well have been lyrics themselves. And why not? Poetry and music have a long history together, from Greek rhapsodes to medieval troubadours. Song lyrics are one of our most common encounters with words, and it would be lovely to think that everyone attached to an iPod was in the process of digesting a poem. At the Smart Set, Kristen Hoggatt took issue with this dismissal of lyrics, writing that Collins is “pushing poetry to the elite fringe.”
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