Lyric poetry
Lyric poetry presents a speaker’s voice, feeling, or reflection, typically in a concentrated form rather than through a sustained sequence of events.
Lyric speaker: The constructed voice that speaks within a poem, distinct from its author. Lyric poems center this voice, whose perspective need not match the poet’s.
Sonnet: A fourteen-line poem, commonly organized by a set rhyme scheme and meter. The sonnet channels lyric reflection through a tightly bounded form.
Lyre: An ancient stringed instrument associated with Greek music and poetry. The instrument gives lyric poetry its name and recalls its early musical performance.
Narrative poetry: Poetry that tells a sequence of events through a narrator. Narrative poetry organizes attention around events, unlike lyric poetry’s concentrated voice or reflection.
Stanza: A grouped set of lines in a poem, often separated from other groups by a blank line. Stanzas give lyric poems compact units for shaping shifts in thought or feeling.
Ode: A poem of formal address that reflects on or celebrates a person, object, or idea. Odes extend lyric attention into sustained praise, meditation, or questioning.
Sappho: An archaic Greek poet from Lesbos, known for surviving fragments of personal and choral poetry. Her poems are central early examples of poetry voiced through desire, memory, and address.
Epic poetry: Long narrative poetry about heroic deeds, often involving a people’s history or myth. Epic scale and sustained action contrast with the lyric poem’s usual compression.
Meter (poetry): The patterned arrangement of stressed and unstressed syllables in poetry. Meter can give a lyric speaker’s language a pulse that reinforces or complicates its mood.
Elegy: A poem of mourning or reflection on death and loss. The elegy is a lyric form shaped around grief and remembrance.