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A Definition of the Lyric

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Charles E. Whitmore
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Extract

It is a commonplace of literary history that no great outburst of poetic energy has been unattended by the lyric. Not only may we fairly say that its vitality is an index of the vitality of the deeper poetic energies, but we may add that it endures when other forms seem dormant or moribund, and that when it is wholly extinguished, true poetry is practically at an end. It would, therefore, seem that an examination of the lyric, and a definition of its peculiar qualities, would be likely to throw light on the nature of poetry itself. We all recognize lyrics when we see them, but we are also conscious that not every poem which wears the outward semblance of a lyric is essentially so; yet it is not always easy to give a precise and satisfactory statement of what constitutes the essence of the lyric form.

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 33 , Issue 4 , 1918, pp. 584 - 600
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1918

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References

1 The original text is accessible in Appel's Provenzalische Chrestomathie (3d ed., 1907), p. 194.

2 See Spingarn, Critical Essays of the Seventeenth Century, vol. i, pp. 5–9. Bacon's general doctrine of the imagination, of course, is another matter, and contains much that is sound and suggestive.

3 Answer to D'Avenant (Spingarn, op. cit., vol. ii, pp. 55–56).

4 Life of Waller.

5 Life of Dryden.

6 See the admirable analysis of this by Vossler, in his Poetische Theorien in der ital. Frührenaissance (Berlin, 1900), especially pp. 69, 79, and 80.

7 Smith, Elizabethan Critical Essays, i, p. 203.

8 Ibid., i, p. 231.

9 Ibid., ii, p. 379.

10 For a good summing-up of the thorny points at issue, see D. S. MacColl, Rhythm in English Verse, Prose, and Speech, in Essays and Studies by Members of the English Association, vol. v (Oxford, 1914), pp. 7–50.

11 For an example of the difference of procedure in one and the same writer, we may take a section from St. Thomas Aquinas's Summa, with its elaborate framework of videtur quod, praeterea, sed contra est, respondeo dicendum, and contrast it with the great Corpus Christi hymn. Can one conceive the method of the Summa versified?

12 Teufelsdröckh's “night-thoughts” in Sartor Resartus (Book i, ch. 3) shows us the imagination nobly at work within the confines of prose.

13 Divagations, p. 251.