Understanding Lyric Poetry

• The term "lyric" comes from the Latin "lyricus," referring to texts created to be sung.
• The origin of lyric poetry is traced back to ancient Greece.
• Ancient lyric works were intended to be read, often accompanied by music and choruses.
• Initially, only popular songs related to the cult of the gods existed.
• These songs were sung during important life events such as birth, weddings, death, and work, linking music and poetry.
• Folk songs evolved into poems sung to the lyre.
• These songs gained literary dignity through regulated metrics.
• Now, the term "lyric" refers to subjective compositions that aren't epic or dramatic.
• Unlike epic poetry, where the poetic voice narrates external actions, lyric poetry involves the writer sharing personal experiences and emotions.

Characteristics of Lyric Poetry

• Focuses on feelings, moods, reflections.
• Explores questions about human nature and the world.
• Can describe the author's experiences or create vivid images.
• While lyric poetry's birth is in ancient Greece, earlier antecedents exist.
• Examples include the Songs of Moses, the Psalms of David.
• Old Indian poems like the Rig-Veda (15th century BC) are also precursors.
• The Rig-veda is a foundation of Vedic religion and one of India's oldest literary texts.
• Notable Greek lyric poets include Alcaeus, Simonides, Sappho, and Anacreon who covered various themes.
• Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides brought lyricism to the theater through tragedy choruses.
• Later, Roman poets Horace and Catullus made significant contributions.
• Lyric poetry expresses the poetic self and their internal world, defined significantly by poets.
• The poetry is subjective with a focus on personal expression.
• Lyric poetry arose as a sung composition or declamation accompanied by an instrument.
• From its origins, lyric poetry contains oral and musical elements.

Lyric Poetry in the Middle Ages

• Lyric poetry maintained an oral tradition with a popular appeal.
• Verses for oral transmission are simple, memorable, and use refrains and rhetorical devices.
• A variety of lyric subtypes emerged in different regions of Spain during Muslim rule.
• "Jarchas" were short compositions in old Spanish, ending longer works in Arabic.
• Popular songs were widespread in the Middle Ages and taken up by troubadours and minstrels.
• Francesco Petrarca in Italy adapted the popular song tradition into "Cancionero".
• "Cancionero" gave lyric poetry scholarly form and written transmission.

Lyric Poetry in the Renaissance

• Lyric poetry adopted sophisticated forms like the sonnet.
• Petrarch cultivated the sonnet form in Italy, and it spread across Europe.
• Shakespeare wrote sonnets in England.
• Spanish Golden Age poets such as Garcilaso, Lope de Vega, Góngora, and Quevedo also wrote sonnets.
• Poets in Spanish America like Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz also used this form.

Lyric Poetry in the Modern Era

• Lyric poetry shifted to liberate itself from established forms, styles, and topics.
• Mid-19th century saw the first indications of lyric poetry detached from religious beliefs.
• The poetry contains metaphors that may be seen as critical of the time's authorities.
• French symbolists embody this shift.
• Charles Baudelaire revolutionized the lyric genre with "Les Fleurs du Mal" (1857).
• Baudelaire's poetry explores sublime and disturbing themes.
• Modern lyric poetry reflects the modern spiritual life.

Literary Movements

• Publication of "Las flores del mal" marked a turning point for lyric poetry, but it faced accusations of public indecency.
• "Las flores del mal" started the Symbolism movement.
• Arthur Rimbaud, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Paul Verlaine (the "accursed poets") led the Symbolism movement.
• They aimed to decipher the world's enigmas.
• A major evolution involved free verse, breaking traditional metrical rules.
• Free verse let poets explore forms beyond classical rhyme/meter patterns.
• Walt Whitman, an American poet, first to proposed free verse in "Leaves of Grass".
• Juan Ramón Jiménez pioneered free verse in Spanish poetry.
• Hispanic American Modernism revolutionized lyric poetry, drawing from French Symbolism and free verse.
• José Martí, Rubén Darío, José Asunción Silva, and others demonstrated this in their works.
• The lyrics have great language originality in poetry.
• The lyric poetry innovation continued through the 20th century with avant-garde movements.
• Avant-garde movements rejected logic and pre-established rules.
• Modern poetry uses traditional elements, e.g classic forms like the sonnet.
• Modern poetry also uses free verse or prose poetry for varied topics and colloquial language.

Elements of the Lyric Genre

• External context to the work includes elements like social context and literary movement.
• Internal aspects to analyze include the literary work's background and shape.
• Background involves content, meaning, and ideas.
• Shape covers the structure, language, and rhetorical tools.
• Analyzing a literary text involves understanding its production context to grasp the era's culture, values, and beliefs.
• Knowing the creation's cultural factors enables pertinent interpretation.
• Understanding the context enables informed, relevant interpretations.
• Understanding reader context is essential, as readers are influenced by their era, culture, ideologies, and aesthetic preferences.
• Fusion of production and reception contexts allows for a more accurate understanding.
• The lyrical poet expresses feelings and emotions unrelated to who is speaking.
• A lyrical subject's existence is fictional.
• The lyrical subject communicates emotions, feelings, doubts, and reflections in response to a moment or object.
• Lyric poetry is usually in the first person to allow intimate sharing.
• The "I" in the poem is not the author.
• The "I" may be emulating emotions, turning the poem into an aesthetic exercise.
• Poems do not narrate a narrative.
• Poems express a specific emotion directly, instead of an action.
• Poems focus on the flow of feelings and thoughts.
• Poems, ancient and modern, seek to express sensations and experiences.
• The themes of death, love, despair, deceit, joy, honor, fidelity, dreams, and fears occur across historical periods.
• The core emotions of the poem remain.
• The addressee of a poem matters, so poets consider their anticipated audience.
• Poets use optimal methods and strategies to capture and communicate to the reader.
• Authors focus on the recipient, who prefers specific styles, themes, and forms.
• Factors like age and past reading shape the way an audience connects with the text.
• Literature reflects its social setting.
• Authors are greatly molded by prevailing trends, cultural values, and societal factors.
• Stable social conditions let authors write or read poetry.
• Instability like war, conflict, or dictatorship makes creating, disseminating, and receiving works more difficult.
• Artists use creativity/distribution as resistance, challenging injustice/oppression.
• Independence movements resulted in romantic poetry focused on freedom.
• The Spanish Civil War and dictatorship inspired social poetry that showcased humanitarian catastrophes.

Literary Currents

• Understanding the literary movement that's tied to a poem enhances admiration and analysis.
• Literary currents can be summarized in the following
• Classical Poetry (Greek/Latin).
  • Form: direct and simple
  • Aims: balance the elements
  • Key figures: Sappho, Anacreon
  • Traditionally recited with a lyre
• Medieval Poetry.
  • Dominated by popular poetry sung to a crowd.
  • Basic message conveyed in verses.
  • Religious aspects are typical.
  • Developed complex cultivated poetry.
• Renaissance Poetry.
  • Seeks refined, sophisticated poetry that restores classical harmony.
  • Requires verse/rhyme structure perfection.
  • Notable artists: Petrarch, Garcilaso de la Vega, Juan de la Cruz
• Baroque Poetry.
  • Covers antiquity or mystical subjects like dream, death but in complex form.
  • Employs language playfully for poetic style.
  • Employs hyperbaton, metaphors, allegory, antithesis.
  • Key figures: Luis de Góngora, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz etc
• Romantic Poetry.
  • Depicts emotional expression.
  • Searches mysterious/esoteric components and landscape.
  • Explores emotions and feelings.
  • Key figures: Gustavo Adolfo Bécquer, Lord Byron, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
• Symbolist Poetry.
  • Goes against realism/sentimentalism.
  • Looks for connection between reality/senses.
  • Important of sense experience.
  • Known for sinesthesia.
  • Key figures: Charles etc.
• Modernist Poetry.
  • Emerges in Hispanic America/influenced.
  • French symbolist poets.
  • Rejects social context/relies on themes.
  • Exotic and far from past themes.
  • Complex vocab.
• Avant-Garde poetry.
  • Wide-ranging as has movements example- futurism, surrealism.
  • Known for visual/collective poems that breaks rules with language.
• Contemporary Poetry.
  • Second half of 20th century highlights.
  • Casual express/everyday subjects.
  • Employs traditional meter, free verse, and no rhyme.
  • Key figures: José Emilio Pacheco, Rubén Bonifaz Nuño, Octavio Paz (Mexico).

Style and Content Levels

• Lyric poetry described as feeling expression through expression.
• Subjectivity characterizes lyrical works.
• The writers communicate their ideas.

Common Themes

• Love, pain, isolation, terror, joy, loneliness, nostalgia.
• Poetry's formal element written in verse is a sign.

Analysis

• The essential to analysis.
• The analysis incorporates structure of lyric.

Considerations

• Morphosyntax, phonology, lexicon, rhetoric.
• Latin word "Versus" makes phrase "Verso".
• Set to a measurement.
• Poems have the ability for its verse.
• Classification is set through syllables.
• Lines below 170 syllabus = shorter art
• Lines below 288 words = art lines lines
• Grouping for sense or purpose is an is an is a verse.
• Gramma comes with syntax structure.
• Modifying syntax requires expressive aim.

Poetic and Visual Analysis

• Poetic analysis involves meter for syllable count or verse.
• Poetic analysis recognizes syllabic license.
• A word means counting syllable.
• Diphthong means counting syllable.
• "Sinalefa" joins syllable to syllable when meet with vowels.
• A rhymes are also resource with frequency in ancient expression and similarities between words.
• Assonance has to be near the prosodic with stress.
• Consonant when have constant sound from each and vowels.
• Rhythm distributes the poem from emphasis, composition and sound.
• Rhetoric and meaning is the point with the works with the form and poem and rhetoric.
  • The lexicon and rhetoric is important from what communicate and feelings.
  • Figures rhetoric and literary devices are use to enhance speech.
  • Rhetorical figures enhance expression.
  • Similes show comparison.
  • Metaphors change the literal word/ element.
  • Hyperbole emphasizes or exaggerate and antithesis opposes idea.
  • The use of context and production and reception of the process and understanding is essential.