Poesía Lírica: Origen y Evolución

• The term "lyric" comes from the Latin "lyricus," referring to a text created to be sung.
• Lyric poetry originated in ancient Greece, where works were composed to be read, some with music and choruses.

Origin and Evolution

• Initially, there were popular songs related to the cult of the gods.
• These songs were sung at important life moments like birth, weddings, death, and work.
• These popular songs, poems sung to the sound of a lyre, were influenced by epic poetry and acquired literary dignity as their metrics were regulated.
• Today, "lyric" designates subjective compositions that are neither epic nor dramatic.
• Unlike epic, where the poetic voice narrates actions in which they didn't participate, lyric writers account for something that happened to them and causes them emotion.
• Lyric poets express their feelings and show their intimacy.
• Lyric poetry features sentiments, moods, reflections, and questions about human nature and the world.
• Some poems don't just talk about the author's experience but also certain images.
• The birth of lyric poetry is located in ancient Greece, but its antecedents can be traced to earlier sources like the Songs of Moses and the Psalms of David.
• It is also present in old poems from India, like in the Rig-veda.
• Notable Greek lyric poets include Alcaeus, Simonides, Sappho, and Anacreon, who spoke of various themes.
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought lyric poetry to the theater in their tragedies' choruses and the Romans Horace and Catullus created more beautiful works.
• The lyric poetry of these poets largely defined this genre, consisting of subjective compositions where the expression of the poetic self and their inner world was important with a certain simplicity in its structure.
• When poetry emerged, it was recognized as a lyric composition, accompanied by an instrument while being sung or recited publicly giving it musical and oral aspects.

Middle Ages

• In the Middle Ages, lyric poetry continued as part of the oral tradition and had a popular feature.
• Verses were prepared to be transmitted through word of mouth or in public squares.
• The compositions were simple to understand, built from resources that facilitate memorization, like the use of refrains and various rhetorical figures.
• Within this long period, many forms of lyric poetry or subgenres were born.
• In some regions of Spain, during the Muslim rule, the "jarchas" were created, which were brief compositions written in old Spanish that closed more extensive works in Arabic.

Renaissance

• In the Renaissance, lyric poetry took on various refined forms like the sonnet.
• The sonnet was cultivated by Petrarch in Italy and extended through Europe.
• Shakespeare composed sonnets in England.
• The poets of the Golden Age in Spain composed sonnets and other types of verses including Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, Góngora, and Quevedo.
• Poets in Hispano-America, like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, also used this poetic composition.

Modern Era

• In the modern era, the lyric genre changed to free itself from certain forms or styles and pre-established topics.
• In the mid-19th century, the first manifestations of a lyric poetry distanced from religious beliefs with metaphors that can be considered a criticism of the authorities of the time.
• This is the case with the French symbolists.
• Charles Baudelaire completely renovated the lyric genre with his work "The Flowers of Evil" (1857).
• Charles's poetic voice travels between the sublime and the diabolical.
• The author manages to represent before the reader the spiritual life of modern man.
• The publication of "The Flowers of Evil" as a watershed moment for the lyric genre was accused of outrage against public morals, and six poems had to be removed from the book.
• "The Flowers of Evil" inaugurated symbolism, a literary movement led by the French poets Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Verlaine.
• Arthur, Stéphane and Paul's generation was known as the "cursed poets," who tried to decipher the enigma of the world and everything that inhabited it.
• Another major event in the evolution of the lyric genre was the inclusion of free verse, that is, the breaking of metrics established for centuries.
• With this type of verse, poets could explore other forms that did not have classic guidelines like rhyme or meter.
• Walt Whitman, an American poet, was the main proponent of free verse through "Leaves of Grass".
• The Spanish poet, Juan Ramón Jiménez, was the first to use this mode of writing poetry.
• With Spanish American modernism, the lyric genre had a revolution that started from French symbolism and free verse, literary currents that opposed in Europe.
• These characteristics converge in José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva, Leopoldo Lugones, José Santos Chocano, and Manuel Gutiérrez Nájera.
• They manifested a great originality through poetic language.
• Throughout the 20th century, lyric poetry continued to be renovated.
• It occurred with the emergence of avant-garde breaking logic and discarding pre-established rules.
• Currently, poetry can include traditional elements or use other compositions like free verse or prose poetry to address varied themes and use colloquial registers.

Elements of the Lyric Genre

• External elements to the work exist such as aspects related to the production and reception.
• Aspects related to the social context in which the poet and the literary movement emerged.
• Two aspects have been used to analyze a lyric work: the background and the form.
• The background relates to the meaning, the content and the ideas.
• The form relates to the structure, the words, the rhetorical resources and the language.

Context of Production and Reception

• One way to interpret a literary text is through understanding the context of production in which the work was generated.
• Otherwise, it would be difficult to decipher medieval or baroque poetry.
• The culture, beliefs, and values of the era would need to be ignored which would result in an incomplete reading.
• The context of production involves knowing the main features of the culture that predominated when a literary creation was written to understand better and make a relevant and informed interpretation of the work.
• The context of reception involves the readers also being inscribed in a certain era where there is a culture and systems of beliefs, with certain ideologies and aesthetic tastes.
• Effectively interpreting a work requires a fusion of the context of production.
• These two contexts together can generate a more accurate understanding of a lyrical work.

Author or Lyric Subject

• In lyric poetry, the poet expresses feelings and emotions.
• This creates a lyrical subject who, like the narrator of narrative works, is a fictitious being whose existence depends on the work.
• The lyrical subject expresses the feelings, sensations, doubts, shortcomings and reflections that a moment or a specific object provokes in them.
• Lyric poetry is subjective and written in the first person.
• Lyric poetry becomes a kind of autobiographical account, but the "I" of the poem should not be confused with the author.
• The poet may be emulating feelings they don't really feel; in this way, the poem would be nothing more than an aesthetic exercise.

Poem

• A poem doesn't narrate a story as such, nor does an action unfold.
• The poet expresses a certain emotion immediately and directly.
• Unlike narrative, emotions, feelings, and sensations are always present and have been since antiquity until now.
• Despite the elements of poetry appearing lost, one still seeks to express different sensations and experiences through it.
• Topics like death, love, hopelessness, deceit, happiness, honor, fidelity, longings of various types, dreams, fears, and others are presented in poems of different historical periods.
• Human emotions change over time.
• While the form changes, the themes continue.

Lyrical Addressee or Reader

• An author of a poetic composition has an addressee and even an ideal reader.
• From the beginning, an author conceives their poetry with the reader or listener who will receive it in mind.
• The best forms or strategies to capture their attention and transmit the message are considered.
• In each era, the authors of the lyric genre focus on the addressee or recipient of their work, who already has a formed taste.
• Affinities change to the changes in tastes in styles, lyrical forms and themes.
• Affinities also depend on age and new readings which also determine the reception of the work.

Social Context

• Every literary work is marked by the social context in which it is created.
• An author is influenced by the fashions that prevail, the established cultural aspects, the ideas that predominate, and social, economic, and political events.
• When there is a social context of stability, the authors can sit down to write or read poetry.
• When there is a particular moment of instability, artists face obstacles to the creation and reception of works.
• The artists will fight these difficulties to generate and disseminate their texts as ways resisting injustices and oppression when there's instability.
• Romantic poetry addressing the theme of freedom was produced during the independence movements.
• Social poetry was created in the Spanish Civil War and subsequent dictatorship focused on transmitting the humanitarian disaster by one part and reaffirming hope through justice and freedom.
• When interpreting a poetic work in the context of the social, cultural, and polital it is important to understand the meaning and intention of the work.
• Knowing the literary current of the context of a poetic work serves for a better appreciation and interpretation.

Literary Currents Of Poetry

• Classical (Greco-Latin) poetry has a simple form, a direct message, seeks balance between form and content and has Safo and Anacreonte as their greatest exponents.
• Classical poetry was composed to be recited and accompanied by the lyre.
• Medieval poetry is predominated by popular poetry sung with a simple message, employs verses of lesser art and religious themes are touched.
• Cult poetry was also generated, with verses of greater art and more complex messages.
• Renaissance poetry seeks a cultured and complex poetry and the principles of equilibrium of the classical era are taken.
• A formal perfection in the composition of the verses is also sought, with metrics and defined rhymes.
• The baroque themes antiquity or mystics.
• Authors use an ostentatious poetic form like hyperbaton, metaphor, allegory, and antithesis.
• Romantic poetry is characterized by an emphatic expression of the poetic self and by the search for esoteric or mysterious themes and for describing gloomy or stormy landscapes.
• The emotions of the soul are explored to the maximum by the poets of this movement.
• Symbolist poetry reveals itself against realism and sentimentality.

Modernist Poetry

• They seek to discover, through poetic expression, the links between reality and sensations.
• The expression of the senses is very important and is influenced by symbolist poets.
• Latinisms and complex and overloaded expressions are employed.
• Vanguard Poetry is a broad current with different avant-garde manifestations and the use of visual and collective poems.
• Contemporary poetry returns to colloquial expression and everyday themes.

Levels of Poetry: Background and Form

• Lyrical poetry has been defined as the expression of feelings through words.
• The genre is characterized by subjectivity.
• The poet offers a part of their thinking, their interior, and their vision of reality.
• An error is believing that lyrical poetry is associated only with romantic feelings, although being in love is one of the most frequent themes, it is not limited to only love
• Any expression of the author's emotions when contemplating the world or reality can be considered lyrical.
• The expressions can be love, sorrow, loneliness, fear, failure, joy, helplessness, nostalgia.
• Any expression is subjected to an aesthetic depuration.
• The most recognizable formal characteristic of poetry is that it is written in verse.
• The poem is the union of an emotional background and certain formal characteristics that determine it at a simple glance, even before the eyes of people who have never read poetry.
• The first level of analysis regards the formal aspects of the poems.
• One of the most important aspects to consider is its structure.
• The next most import aspect is the bottom which includes: content, meaning which encompass morphosyntax, phono-phonological structure.
• Morfosintáctico is the is a system of words
• The word "verso" comes from the Latin "versus," and is composed of a set of words subject to a certain measure and cadence.
• Verses are classified according to the number of syllables they possess.
• If they have between two and eight syllables, they are called verses of minor art.
• Those containing more than nine syllables are known as verses of major art.
• Those that have less than twelve syllables are simple verses, and those with twelve or more are compound verses.
• Verses also receive a name according to their length whether it contains bisyllabic, trisyllabic and or tetrasyllabic.
• A grouping of various verses, with a determined sense, forms a stanza.
• Syntax is the arrangement of phrases or sentences within a verse.
• Each language's grammar has its own models for composing syntactically the statements, although within the scope of poetry this order can be modified according to the expressive intention of the poet.
• In terms of the form of a poem, the metrics are analyzed and is used to analyze the number of syllables that make up a verse, taking into account the metric licenses:
• If a verse ends in a acute word, a syllable is added to the count; if it ends in proparoxytone, a syllable is subtracted, and if it ends in oxytone, the syllabic count is left equal.
• Another of the most common licenses is synaloepha, which consists of the junction of two distinct syllables when there is a vocal encounter.
• Rhyme is another of the most frequent phonetic resources in traditional poetry and consists in the similarity or equality of the sounds of the letters after the accent of the words which includes the types of rimas: consonate and assonance.
• Rhythm is one of the fundamental elements of poetry and is generated from an adequate distribution of accents to achieve musicality, as well as from the composition of the verses.
• The lexicon-semantic and rhetorical element in a poem addresses the meaning, interpretation of the poetic text and to specify the meaning of the terms used by the author.
• Identifying the message contained in the poem, the experience, and the feeling of the author analyzes