LITR 4533 Tragedy UHCL 2002 genre presentation

Lyric poetry—Which takes its name from songs accompanied by the lyre—is distinguished from dramatic and narrative poetry. Although the boundaries are flexible, most lyric poems are fairly short, and are often personal.

'Lyric' a category first used in the Hellenistic period…it is often used in a very general sense to refer to an entire period of (literary) history, 'the lyric age', between the 'Homeric Age' (Homer wrote, or whatever, in epic hexameters) and the Classical. In this period (more or less the seventh and sixth centuries Before the Common Era, B.C.E.), it seemed, poetry became more varied in metre and tone, more personal and contemporary, less heroic. Since it seems clear that there was lyric poetry before the 'lyric age' and epic after the 'Homeric Age' and since, indeed, Homer's traditional priority may be simply a reflection of epic's stylistic qualities and content in comparison to lyric, this apparent shift or revolution in literature is likely to be a mirage. It is also used in modern English, as in 'lyrical', to refer to poetry suitable for singing to the lyre in tone or sensibility.

Wordsworth, It is a Beauteous Evening; Yeats, When You are Old; Roethke, Root Cellar; Whitman, O Me, O Life!; Plath, Morning Song

Hernadi, Paul. Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1972.

“Lyric.” Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics. Ed. Alex Preminger. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965. 460-470.

The Night House by Billy Collins

Every day the body works in the fields of the world

mending a stone wall

or swinging a sickle through the tall grass--

the grass of civics, the grass of money--

and every night the body curls around itself

and listens for the soft bells of sleep.

But the heart is restless and rises

from the body in the middle of the night,

and leaves the trapezoidal bedroom

with its thick, pictureless walls

to sit by herself at the kitchen table

and heat some milk in a pan.

And the mind gets up too, puts on a robe

and goes downstairs, lights a cigarette,

and opens a book on engineering.

Even the conscience awakens

and roams from room to room in the dark,

darting away from every mirror like a strange fish.

And the soul is up on the roof

in her nightdress, straddling the ridge,

singing a song about the wildness of the sea

until the first rip of pink appears in the sky.

Then, they all will return to the sleeping body

the way a flock of birds settles back into a tree,

resuming their daily colloquy,

talking to each other or themselves

even through the heat of the long afternoons.

Which is why the body--that house of voices--

sometimes puts down its metal tongs, its needle, or its pen

to stare into the distance,

to listen to all its names being called

before bending again to its labor

Kelly: Started with the necessary background information of what a lyric poem is and what it pertains to.

Kelly: Question- How has the treatment of the lyric evolved from Sappho to Collins?

Night House appears to be about us. It appears to be more personal. For example, “Heart gets up….”

In this poem, we see that there is no middle or end. The poem has the sound patterns and the verbal lyric that represent the idea of a lyric poem. This poem has a narrative voice.

Kelly: Heart is female; soul is female. The conscience is not gendered but the feeling part is.

White: Sappho appears to have an elevated lyric about it and in Night House, is it poetry or not? Night House is at an exalted level, but it is simple.

Student 2: Sappho appears to be capable of becoming a song whereas Night House cannot.

Kelly: Sappho plays more on the lyric (verbal), Night House more a play with words.

Student 1: Night House seems to be more personal which personifies the things we do.

Enjoyment of lyric poetry, like enjoyment of any other genre, depends in part on knowledge of its conventions. To what extent are these familiar or unfamiliar? What do we already know that can make us very comfortable with reading a lyric poem?

We are in fact familiar with two kinds of popular "texts" that bear some similarity to and have some of the same "feel" as lyric poetry. We also know how to recognize a lyric poem when we see one (more important than we might at first think), as well as how, in general, we are expected to read it. Finally, we know more about two of its special conventions, "stanza" form and the "speaker," than we may realize.

Lyric poetry makes its impact in a very brief space. It stresses moments of feeling. It is often quite memorable. In these and several other ways, lyric poems resemble two other kinds of "texts" with which we are quite familiar: ninety-second popular songs and fifteen-second television commercials. Both of these aim, in extremely brief time, to capture moments of feeling. Both aim to imprint themselves in our memory. To achieve this, besides repeated air play, both use internal forms of repetition.